Zosia Kuczyńska – författare

In 1940, a young girl is taken from her home in Eastern Poland to Arkhangelsk, Siberia; in 1942, she boards a train. Seventy years later, that journey is reimagined by her granddaughter, Zosia Kuczyńska. As Kuczyńska’s poems tell the story of her babcia, her maternal grandmother, coming to England, she confronts some of the big questions of art and history: how do you tell another person’s story without exploiting it? What’s at stake when we try make patterns out of the past, and can we ever leave those patterns behind? Kuczyńska’s poems are both richly narrative and sharply attentive to the complexities of home and culture. They capture human endurance through the redrawing of political maps, from ‘the heat of Easter in Tehran’ to the powdered eggs and stocking shortages of the London Blitz.

With others in your absence tells the story of a return to the living, travelling out of the acuteness of grief into new ways of being towards others. Moving forwards and occasionally backwards in time, it celebrates the platonic relationships through which the speaker learns to readjust to a world made strange following the loss of a parent. Many of the poems are very loosely based on seasons 11–14 of the ‘classic’ series of Doctor Who, each drawing its title and imagery from a different serial.Excerpt from '2017'Joe and I are drinking too much Spanish lager in a bar in West Bridgford. It’s been eleven months: right now, I can no more elegise my dad than I could have called him ‘father’, and anyway, ‘dad’ sounds flat, like it belongs in that blunt universe in which the dead can’t be addressed as lyric people.Joe reminds me that an elegy is something that you write when you’ve resolved your grief. I feel like an apple that’s fallen from a tree into a bed of roses in winter, skewered like a severed head upon a thorny stem, which is to say I am far from resolution.

Whether uncovering forgotten source materials for Friel’s plays or working with current practitioners in the arts, Kuczynska reveals how an approach to literary archives grounded in artistic practice might provide the tools for setting a major creative legacy not in stone but rather in motion.