In the Middle Distance

Krzysztof Majer is an assistant professor in the Department of North American Literature and Culture at the University of Lodz, Poland; his academic interests include North American fiction, intermediality, and Jewish culture. He has written on Mordecai Richler (e.g. a contribution to the Richler issue of Canadian Literature), Rawi Hage, Patrick deWitt, Mark Anthony Jarman, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Steven Millhauser, and Thomas Bernhard. He has edited Beirut to Carnival City: Reading Rawi Hage (Brill,  2019). He is also the co-editor of Kanade, di Goldene Medine? Perspectives on Canadian-Jewish Literature and Culture (Brill, 2018; with Justyna Fruzinska, Jozef Kwaterko and Norman Ravvin) and Tools of Their Tools: Communications Technologies and American Cultural Practice (CSP, 2008; with Grzegorz Kosc). Since 2014, he has collaborated with Canadian Literature as reviewer of criticism and fiction. He has also published interviews with Canadian writers such as Bill Gaston, Rawi Hage or Sherry Simon. He has co-organized several international conferences, including the 8^th Congress of the Polish Association for Canadian Studies: Canadian (Re)Visions: Futures, Changes, Revolutions / « Les (Re)Visions canadiennes: Projections, Changements, Révolutions » (Lodz, 2019) and Machines / Ravines: Negotiating the (Technological) Sublime (Lodz, 2017).

As a translator of literature, Krzysztof Majer was twice awarded the Literatura na Swiecie prize, as well as the 2nd Prize in the John Dryden Translation Competition, organized by the British Centre for Literary Translation and the British Comparative Literature Association. 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, Patrick deWitt’s Undermajordomo Minor, Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue, Patti Smith's Year of the Monkey, a collection of Bill Gaston’s short stories, Allen Ginsberg’s letters, the Kerouac / Ginsberg correspondence, as well as shorter works by – among others – Herman Melville, Chinua Achebe, Madeleine Thien, Steven Millhauser, Arthur Machen, D. J. Enright, David Markson and John Gould. For the research purposes of Goldie Morgentaler, he has also translated some hundred Polish letters exchanged by Chava Rosenfarb and Zenia Larsson.

He is an active member of the Polish Association for Canadian Studies and of the Polish Literary Translators’ Association.