Foreign rights

Contact information:

debowska@karakter.pl

We represent translation rights to books by the following authors:

• Marcin Wicha
• Filip Springer
• Patryk Pufelski
• Aleksandra Lipczak
• Olga Drenda
• Jagoda Ratajczak
• Agata Sikora

Marcin Wicha (b. 1972), is a graphic designer, author of book covers, posters and graphic signs. Occassionally he writes. His texts and cartoons have been published by various magazines and weeklies. He is also the author of several successful books for children.

Titles represented:

• Ill-Born. Polish Post-war Modernist Architecture
• Mortar. The Life and Work of Zofia and Oskar Hansen
• Miedzianka
• 13 pięter
• Wanna z kolumnadą
• Mein Gott, jak pięknie
  

Ill-Born. Polish Post-war Modernist Architecture

Źle urodzone. Reportaże o architekturze PRL-u, reportage, Karakter 2012, 272 pages, ISBN 978-83-62376-12-4

Rights sold:

• Germany (DOM Publishers)
• Russia (Ad Marginem)

Books and exhibitions like David Crowley’s Cold War Modern have shown that the architectural ideology of late modernism were a key front in the ideological war between the two sides of the iron curtain. In the countries of the former Soviet bloc that architecture has since ended up on the trash heap of history. Subsequent exhibits, books, and other publications defend or simply describe the art created under communism, including socialist modernism, which turned out simply to be “ill-born,” as Filip Springer’s terrific title suggests. With the innocent eye of someone born just seven years before Poland’s first free elections, this journalist and photographer examines monuments of a prior era and asserts that “after all, it’s good architecture.”

Ill-Born is also a book of photography – made up of valuable archival items as well as new photographs by Springer himself – as well as a collection of reportage on these bastard-buildings. These two halves complement each other wonderfully. Beyond the stigmatized constructions themselves, Springer highlights the fates of the architects, thereby illuminating the reality of the Polish People’s Republic in a rich and nuanced light. Springer investigates what happens to the wartime generation, which sought out some local version of modernity. Particularly fascinating are their games with power.

Filip Springer, then, places his emphasis on people, not on architecture. Nevertheless, the lives of the buildings since 1989 also emerge from among the pages of this book, in the rebuilding and fencing in of socialist spaces, in the ruination of their structures by new investors. The question remains open: are these artistically brilliant, modern symbols of the official style of “socialism with a human face” actually livable?

(Max Cegielski, courtesy of the Book Institute)

Mortar. The Life and Work of Zofia and Oskar Hansen

Zaczyn. O Zofii i Oskarze Hansenach, reportage, Karakter 2013, 264 pages, ISBN 978-83-62376-24-7

Shortlisted for the Kapuściński Award 2013

Rights available: World

A brilliant biographical reportage about a pair of visionary Polish architects, who lived and worked in the People’s Republic of Poland. The history of Oskar Hansen and his family could serve as basis for a movie scenario: the son of a Norwegian and a Russian spends ww ii in Vilnius, where he joins the Polish partisan movement; after the war he studies architecture. During a scholarship in Paris he works for Jeanneret, he gets to know great painters like Picasso, whom he gives some valuable advice. Despite offers to stay in the West, he returns to Poland where he and his wife Zofia work as architects and develop the idea of the Open Form. Their designs are bold, unusual and suited to the needs of ordinary people – who would object to having a flat made to measure? Alas, in the bleak reality of communist Poland their ideas undergo modifications beyond the architects’ control. The outcome is e.g. the ill-named housing estate Przyczółek Grochowski in Warsaw, a place you do not choose, but are sentenced to. This is where Filip Springer, the author of the book decides to settle. He wants to know what it is like to live in a place where the theories of the Hansens were implemented, and to understand, why their innovative ideas did not quite work out in reality.

Springer writes about original personalities, extraordinary human fate and brave architecture, as well as about our mentality. About a vision of saving the world based on faith in man and a sense of duty towards others, and the lack of such a vision in today’s world. An engaging, thought-provoking book.

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Patryk Pufelski

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Aleksandra Lipczak

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Olga Drenda

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Jagoda Ratajczak

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Agata Sikora