Heart of Conrad

He is the Chair of the Joseph Conrad Society (UK) and author of four critical monographs on Conrad: Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity (Basingstoke: Macmillan / New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992); Cross-Cultural Encounters in Conrad’s Malay Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave: 2000); Conrad’s Secrets (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); and Joseph Conrad, Cosmopolitanism and Transnationalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). He has also published a critical biography, Joseph Conrad (Reaktion Books, 2020) as well as editing a range of works by Conrad.

She has published five books on modernism, translation and adaptation studies (most recently Adaptations of J. Conrad’s Life and Works in Contemporary Culture, 2022) and numerous articles on Conrad, Harold Pinter, William Golding, Jatinder Verma, T.S. Eliot, George Bernard Shaw. Her latest book is The Resonance of Joseph Conrad in Contemporary Culture out now from Berghahn Books.

She is the author of Rethinking Joseph Conrad’s Concepts of Community: Strange Fraternity (Bloomsbury, 2017). She also translated into Japanese Conrad’s The Rover (1923, out in Japanese in 2022) and the new biography, Joseph Conrad (Reaction, 2020) by Robert Hampson (2024). She is now working on a translation of Conrad’s Nostromo.

His works have been translated into nineteen languages. A short animated movie by Tomasz Baginski based on his novella ‘Katedra’ ('The Cathedral') was nominated for an Academy Award in 2003. The Netflix series Into the Night was based on his novel Starość aksolotla (The Old Axolotl). Dukaj has won a European Literary Award and a Kościelski Award. He lives in Krakow. His Ice, translated by Ursula Phillips, is out from Head of Zeus.

Dukaj studied philosophy at the Jagiellonian University. He is known for the complexity of his books, and it has often been said that a single short story by Dukaj contains more ideas than many writers put into all their books in their lifetime. The themes frequent in his works include technological singularity, philosophy of history, limits of language and humanity, and thus his books can often be classified as hard science fiction. Dukaj's books bear some resemblance to Neal Stephenson’s writing, however his stylistic brio makes him as much a 'literary' as a 'hard science fiction' writer – allowing comparisons with books by Thomas Pynchon or David Mitchell. His essays touch on subjects like 'engineering the meaning of life', 'art in the age of artificial intelligence', consequences of shift to non-symbolic communication and thought, relationships between values and technology – drawing frequent comparisons to work of Yuval Noah Harari.

His books and short stories have been translated into 19 languages, including English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Czech, Hungarian, Italian, Slovakian, Ukrainian, Azerbaijani, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian and Albanian.

Of Polish heritage and fluent in the Polish language, Madera regularly covers stories from Eastern and Central Europe. She specialises in international affairs with a personal insight into eastern Europe. At the start of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Madera was one of the first international journalists to report live from the Poland-Ukraine border, interviewing refugees in Polish and Ukrainian.