Other Voices, Other Routes

Krzysztof Majer is a literary scholar and translator. He works as an assistant professor in the Department of American Literature at the University of Lodz, Poland, and is a member of the Polish Association for Canadian Studies. His academic interests include contemporary Canadian fiction, North American Jewish literature and culture, and – more recently – musico-literary intermediality. His doctoral dissertation, The Picaro Messiah and the Unworthy Scribe, was devoted to Mordecai Richler; he contributed to the Richler issue of Canadian Literature (2010). He has also written on Rawi Hage, Mark Anthony Jarman, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Steven Millhauser, Thomas Bernhard and François Girard, and has conducted published interviews with Canadian writers such as Bill Gaston, Rawi Hage, Sherry Simon and Norman Ravvin. He has co-edited Kanade, di Goldene Medine? Perspectives on Canadian-Jewish Literature and Culture / Perspectives sur la littérature et la culture juives canadiennes (Brill, 2018) and Tools of Their Tools: Communications Technologies and American Cultural Practice (CSP, 2009). Since 2014, he has collaborated with Canadian Literature as reviewer of criticism and fiction.

 In his capacity as translator, Krzysztof Majer was awarded a co-residency at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre with writers Rawi Hage and Madeleine Thien in 2015. He has also translated, among others, Michael Herr’s Dispatches (2016, awarded the Literatura na Swiecie prize and nominated for two other translation prizes), Patrick deWitt’s Undermajordomo Minor (2016), Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue (2018), Allen Ginsberg’s letters (2014, awarded the Literatura na Swiecie prize), the Kerouac / Ginsberg correspondence (2012) as well as shorter works by Chinua Achebe, D. J. Enright, Niall Griffiths and Paul McVeigh. In 2016, he was awarded the 2nd Prize in the John Dryden Translation Competition (organized by the British Centre for Literary Translation and the British Comparative Literature Association) for renditions into English of selected stories from Andrzej Stasiuk’s collection Kucajac. He is a member of the Polish Literary Translators’ Association.