The Witty and the Weird

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, among others, 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), a pioneering collection of commissioned articles on the writers' work. 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 Rawi Hage, Bill Gaston and 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 » (University of Lodz, 2019) and Machines / Ravines: Negotiating the (Technological) Sublime (University of 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, Herman Melville's Benito Cereno, Patrick deWitt’s Undermajordomo Minor, Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue, Patti Smith's Year of the Monkey, Allen Ginsberg’s letters, the Kerouac / Ginsberg correspondence, as well as shorter works by – among others – Chinua Achebe, Madeleine Thien, Steven Millhauser, Arthur Machen, D. J. Enright, David Markson and John Gould. He has selected and co-translated (with Kaja Gucio) a career-spanning volume of Bill Gaston's stories, published in Polish as Bogowie pokazuja klaty. He has also guest-edited a special issue of the Polish literary magazine "Literatura na Swiecie," devoted to contemporary Canadian writing in translation, and featuring the work of Rawi Hage, Madeleine Thien, Mark Anthony Jarman, Barbara Gowdy, Lisa Moore, Michael Winter and John Gould. For the research purposes of Goldie Morgentaler (University of Lethbridge), 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.