One of Poland’s most celebrated playwrights and authors, Sławomir Mrożek celebrates his 80th birthday today. 

The writer currently lives in Nice, south of France. He left his home city of Krakow for health reasons two years ago, saying that he intends to spend the rest of his life in France.  

He had emigrated from Poland for the first time in 1963 and lived in Italy for eight years. Initially, he did not want to enter into an open conflict with the Polish communist authorities in order to be able to have contact with Polish theatres and Polish readers.

Following the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, however, Mrożek wrote a protest letter and fell foul of the Polish regime. He subsequently lived in France, the United States, Germany and Mexico until 1996, when  he returned to Krakow with his Mexican wife.

He is expected to visit Poland to attend the ‘Mrożek for the 21st Century’ festival on 21-26 September and the launch of the first volume of his Diaries, covering the years 1963-69. He started to keep a diary at the end of the 1940s. After ten years, however,  he decided to destroy a dozen or so volumes.

The second and third volume of the Diaries will cover the 1970s and 80s. The publication is awaited with enormous interest as the Diaries present a broad panorama of Polish cultural life spanning almost four decades. Among Mrożek’s friends were such household names as Stanisław Lem, Czesław Miłosz, Konstanty Jeleński, Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, Jerzy Giedroyć and Józef Czapski. According to Mrożek, one of the most important strands of the Diaries is his friendship with the writer Witold Gombrowicz, who is dubbed by Mrożek as ‘the boss’ or ‘padrone’.

Mrożek is among Poland’s most often translated authors. His best-known plays are The Tango, The Emigres, The Ambassador, The Slaughterhouse and Love in the Crimea.  This year Penguin published a collection of Mrożek’s short stories The Elephant. One of his early books, dating from 1957, it is a satire on life in Poland under a totalitarian system. (mk)