Żanna Słoniowska


Żanna Słoniowska is a Polish novelist and journalist. She was the first winner of the Znak literary prize for her novel The House with the Stained-Glass Window and a Conrad Prize winner.

Biography

Słoniowska was born in Lviv in 1978, in a family with Polish antecedents. She attended the Ukrainian Academy of Printing, following which she worked as a journalist for the television channel NTA.
In 2002, she moved to Poland. She began doctoral studies in Warsaw's University of Social Sciences and Humanities. After her marriage, she moved to Krakow.
In 2013, she published a historical work The most beautiful photographs of pre-war Lviv, illustrated with fine photographs. The following year, her debut novel The House with the Stained-Glass Window was published.
Her novel won the Znak publishing house's prize for best novel, Conrad prize for new writers, as well as being shortlisted for the Nike Award in 2016. A reviewer in Polityka said that "the grandeur of the book is impressive - through a small family saga it depicts the history of Ukraine over the last hundred years". Another called it "a tale saturated with vivid colors, paintings, dreamy moments,... it is, above all, a moving and insightful saga about women, entangled in history."

Selected works

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