Witold Szabłowski: The Assassin from Apricot City

Born in 1980. A journalist and reporter who spent many years contributing for the “Gazeta Wyborcza” daily and its “Duży Format” weekly supplement. More recently, he has been working for the “Dzień dobry TVN” TV programme. For close on two years, he lived and studied in Turkey. In 2010, his anthology of reportage from Turkey, The Assassin from Apricot City (Stork Press 2013, trans. A. Lloyd-James) came out in Poland, awarded with the Beata Pawlak Prize shortly afterwards. The book was later awarded the British PEN Club Prize and acclaimed as one of the most important non-English fiction books of 2013 in the US. Later, he went on to publish e.g. Dancing Bears (Penguin 2018, trans. A. Lloyd-James) and Sprawiedliwi zdrajcy. Sąsiedzi z Wołynia (2016). His most recent book is entitled Merhaba (2018) and includes a personal Polish-Turkish dictionary. “For me, Turkey is like a ferry carrying so many extremities, so that I am sometimes really not sure which direction it is going to take,” he says.