Agata Tuszynska (born May 25, 1957) is a Polish writer, poet and journalist.
Biography
The daughter of Bogdan Tuszyński, sports reporter and historian, and Halina Przedborska journalist, Agata Tuszynska graduated from the prestigious Academy of Drama and Theatrical Art in Warsaw, majoring in History of Drama. She received her PhD in humanities from the Institute of Arts of the Polish Academy of Sciences. In 1987–1992, she worked as a lecturer at the Institute of Literary Research. In 1996–1998, she lectured at the Center for Journalism in Warsaw, and from 2001, taught courses in reportage and literary history at Warsaw University. From 2011 she's been cooperating with the Reportage Institute in Warsaw.
She began her literary career in cultural periodicals as an author of articles on theater, combining it with an interest in biography and literary reportage. She made her debut in 1990 with the fin de siècle biography of the Warsaw actress, Maria Wisnowska. The same year, she published the book Russians in Warsaw, in the Literary Institute in Paris, describing the life and culture of the enslaved capital under the Russian occupation. In 1994, she published the book Singer: Landscapes of Memory, the biography of the Nobel winner Isaac Bashevis Singer, born in Poland and writing in Yiddish. Tuszynska collected materials for this book in the United States, Israel, France, and in Polish small towns and villages. The book, reprinted many times in Poland, was also published in the USA and France.
Tuszynska continued her interest in the vanishing world of the Polish Jews in the volume of Israeli reports Portraits with Poland in the Background, also published in the French translation. Confessions of a Temptress – memories of Irena Krzywicka, writer and feminist, author of Literary News and a longtime friend of Tadeusz Boy-Zelenski – was the book Tuszynska wrote in a tiny town near Paris, where Krzywicka lived since the mid-1960s. In her next book, The Long Life of a Temptress, published in 1999 Tuszynska returned to Krzywicka's story after her death.
A Family History of Fear, Tuszynska's bestseller, released in March 2005, and nominated for the Prix Medicis, is a dramatic and complex story about the fate of her Polish and Jewish ancestors. The author combined here her experience in biography writing with personal non-fiction, the genre rarely used in Poland. In May 2016 the book was published in English by Knopf.
A story of her struggle with her husband's cancer is the subject of Exercises of Loss, very intimate book by Agata Tuszynska (2007), also published in French (Grasset, 2009) and Korean (2012).
The most controversial in her literary output is The Accused: Vera Gran (Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2010) – the story of a singer from the Warsaw ghetto, accused of collaborating with the Germans. The book, based on conversations with Gran, supplemented by witness accounts and opinions, documents, archives and court testimony, has become a multidimensional treatise on the tragic choices, their moral consequences and the price to pay for salvation. "The Accused" was published in a number of countries: France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Greece, Israel and in the US by Knopf-Randomhous-Bertelsmann Publishers. It was released in Germany by Suhrkamp / Insel in March 2013. In 2015 the Slovenian Modrijan published the book, as well as the Macedonian publishing house Antolog. The story of Vera Gran is also available in an audible audio edition in Polish.
Tyrmandowie. Romans amerykański is Tuszyńska’s latest publication. It tells the story about the last period of Tyrmand’s life, the author of Zły (published in English as The Man With White Eyes), alongside his American wife – Mary Ellen Fox. Almost a hundred of never before published Tyrmand’s letters complete memories of the widow, showing a completely unseen face of the Vistula River playboy.
In November 2013 Dialog published a drama Wiera co-written with Jerzy Żurek.
In The Fiancé of Bruno Schulz (Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2015) she presents an extraordinary literary story, connecting dramatic elements of love and war. This time she was inspired by Juna, Józefina Szelińska, the only woman whom Bruno Schulz proposed the marriage. The book was nominated for the Prix Médicis and the Prix Femina 2015. It was translated into French, Macedonian and Ukrainian.
Jamnikarium (Wydawnictwo MG, 2016) is about dachshunds and their famous owners and for dachshunds lovers.