Twisting Mean

Dr Krzysztof Majer is an assistant professor in the Department of American Literature at the University of Lodz; his academic interests include North American fiction, Jewish culture and intermediality. He has written, among others, on Mordecai Richler (e.g. a contribution to the Richler issue of Canadian Literature), Rawi Hage, M. A. Jarman, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Steven Millhauser and Thomas Bernhard. He has published interviews with Canadian writers such as Sherry Simon or Bill Gaston. He has co-edited Kanade, di Goldene Medine? Perspectives on Canadian-Jewish Literature and Culture / « Perspectives sur la littérature et la culture juives canadiennes » (with Norman Ravvin, Justyna Fruzinska and Jozef Kwaterko; Brill, 2018) and Tools of Their Tools: Communications Technologies and American Cultural Practice (with Grzegorz Kosc, CSP, 2008). Since 2014, he has collaborated with Canadian Literature as reviewer of criticism and fiction. As a translator, he was twice awarded the Literatura na Swiecie prize, as well as the 2nd Prize in BCLT/BCLA’s John Dryden Translation Competition; he was also nominated for the Boy-Zelenski Translation Work Award and the Gdynia Literary Prize. With writers Rawi Hage and Madeleine Thien he was awarded residence at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. Among others, he has translated Michael Herr’s Dispatches, Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue, Patrick deWitt’s Undermajordomo Minor, Allen Ginsberg’s letters, the Kerouac / Ginsberg correspondence, as well as shorter works by Chinua Achebe, Steven Millhauser and D. J. Enright. For the research purposes of Goldie Morgentaler, he has also translated about a hundred Polish letters exchanged by Chava Rosenfarb and Zenia Larsson. He is a member of the Polish Association for Canadian Studies and of the Polish Literary Translators’ Association.