Ice: An Evening with Jacek Dukaj

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.

Ursula has a background in both Russian and Polish Studies and a doctorate in Polish 19th-century literature. She has co-edited five volumes of critical essays on aspects of Polish literature and has been instrumental in introducing the work of Polish female authors to an Anglophone readership both academic and general. Translations include works by 19th and early 20th-century writers Maria Wirtemberska, Narcyza Żmichowska, Zofia Nałkowska, Pola Gojawiczyńska and Maria Kuncewiczowa, as well as contemporaries Wiesław Myśliwski, Agnieszka Taborska and Piotr Paziński.

He is author of Good Change: The Rise and Fall of Poland’s Illiberal Revolution (Stanford University Press, 2025), with Ben Stanley, and Czesław Miłosz’s Faith in the Flesh: Body, Belief, and Human Identity  (Oxford University Press, 2021), as well as co-editor of The Routledge World Companion to Polish Literature (2021) and Multicultural Commonwealth: Poland-Lithuaniaand Its Afterlives (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023). He has published translations of Czesław Miłosz’s The Mountains of Parnassus (Yale University Press, 2017) and a selection of short stories by Bruno Schulz entitled Nocturnal Apparitions: Essential Stories (Pushkin Press, 2022). He is founder and editor-at-large of the news and opinion website Notes from Poland.