Lonely like a Swede? About people of the North who like to be alone - we invite you to a meet-the-author session with the writer Katarzyna Tubylewicz and the photographer Daniel Tubylewicz, which will take place online, on Thursday, February 25, 2021, at 6 pm.
The meeting, whose partner is Wydawnictwo Wielka Litera, will be hosted by Krystyna Weiher-Sitkiewicz. The broadcast will take place on the website.
'Samotny jak Szwed? O ludziach Północy, którzy lubią bywać sami' is first and foremost a story about extraordinary people and their thoughts on solitude, it is interviews, reports and essays. But it is also a book about a journey through Sweden in search of landscapes of solitude - places where you can enjoy being 'alone' and in silence. The author talks about Swedish singles, families and individualism, and about Swedish spirituality, which is best realised in solitude in nature. Together with her interlocutors, she concludes that it is easier for introverts to find satisfaction in life, she wonders what the loneliness of a publicist fighting for subjectivity in a polarised reality is, and why the omnipresent tolerance does not protect anorexics from loneliness in the crowd.
In "Samotny jak Szwed?" there is room for the loneliness of Pippi Långstrump and a Nobel Prize-winning poet who has suddenly run out of words. Tubylewicz's interviewees include Swedish palliative care professor Peter Strang, who deals with the subject of existential loneliness in his patients, Vincent Severski, who knows all about the loneliness of a spy and appreciates Swedish detachment, writer Therese Bohman, who talks about marital loneliness and how lonely people can be when they are climbing the social ladder, and psychotherapist Ewa Heller Ekblad, the granddaughter of the legendary Anna Braude Heller, who was once hidden in the Warsaw Ghetto. There are also a meditation teacher, a film director and many other people who are very aware of their loneliness.
A poetic and visually beautiful complement to the story are atmospheric photographs by her son Daniel Tubylewicz from such picturesque places as Fårö, Gotland, Österlen and Bohuslän.
"Alone as a Swede?" is an insightful story about how one of the fundamental human dilemmas is our ambivalence towards the state of loneliness. 'I want to be alone and I don't want to be alone, so I am?' Is this a new definition of humanity?
Katarzyna Tubylewicz
Writer, cultural studies expert and Swedish translator (she has translated, among others, four novels by Majgull Axelsson and Jonas Gardell's AIDS trilogy, as well as the reportage Shootings in Copenhagen by Niklas Orrenius, for which she was nominated for the Ryszard Kapuściński Award. She is the author of the novels 'Bardzo zimna wiosna', 'Własne miejsca', 'Rówieśniczki' and 'Ostatnia powieść Marcela'. Her reporter's books include the now cult 'Moraliści. Jak Szwedzi uczą się na błędach i inne historie' and 'Sztokholm. Miasto, które tętni ciszą'. In 2006-2012 she was the director of the Polish Institute in Stockholm. She was also the programme director of the first edition of the festival Odnalezione w Tłumaczeniu, Gdańsk Meetings of Translators and taught Polish culture at the Stockholm University. She cooperates with 'Gazeta Wyborcza'. She is the originator and co-author of the famous anthology of talks on the promotion of readership 'Sweden reads. Poland reads'. She lives in Stockholm and Warsaw.