GORCZYŃSKA Renata

Born on 5 May 1943 in Warsaw; daughter of the chemist and technician Stefan Ciarka and the administrator Alicja Rakoczy. Between 1949 and 1960, she attended Primary and Secondary School No. 1 in Warsaw. Between 1960 and 1965, she studied Polish philology at the Faculty of Polish Philology at the University of Warsaw (UW), graduating with a master's degree in 1967. She was a trainee journalist with the magazine "Życie Warszawy" in 1965, the same year that she left for England where she married Andrzej Rumel in 1966. She returned to Poland in December 1966 and was employed as a secretary at the National Museum in Warsaw between January and July 1967. That year, she briefly studied the history of art at UW but soon abandoned her degree. She subsequently worked for Polish Television (TVP) and then for Polish Radio 3 as head of the music section where she also presented the programme Historia jednego przeboju (The Story of a Song). In 1975, she left for the United States on a grant and remained there for several years, where she used the pseudonym Ewa Czarnecka. She was employed at, among other places, the editorial office of the émigré periodical "Nowy Dziennik". In 1979/80, she conducted a series of interviews with Czesław Miłosz that was published in 1983 as Podróżny świata (The World Traveller). After he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980, she became his assistant and secretary. From 1985, she and her husband, the architect Andrzej Gorczyński, lived in Paris, where she collaborated with "Kultura" periodical, Radio Free Europe and BBC Radio. She also took courses in Polish philology at the Sorbonne. Following the death of her husband, she returned to Poland in 1992 where from around 1994 she took up a post as deputy director of Polish Radio Bis, serving until 1999/2000. She was awarded the D. Fikus Prize in 1999 in recognition of her role in organizing a fourteen-hour marathon reading of Pan Tadeusz on the radio to mark the bicentenary of the birth of its author, Adam Mickiewicz. Her column pieces, essays, prose pieces and literary criticism appeared in periodicals including the Paris-based "Kultura" (1989-1992), the "Przegląd Polski" supplement of the "Nowy Dziennik" newspaper (New York; 1990, 1993-1995, 1999, 2001, 2002, and 2004), "Dekada Literacka" (1993, 2001, and 2002), "Twój Styl" (1994, 1996, and 2001), "Zeszyty Literackie" (1997-2002), the "Plus Minus" supplement of the daily "Rzeczpospolita" (1998, 1999, 2001, and 2002), "Przekrój" (2002), "Kwartalnik Artystyczny" (2018), and "Bliza" (2021). In 2019, she began publishing column pieces and essays on the website of the Próby Publishing House. She was for a time a lecturer at the Higher School of Social Communication in Gdynia. She lives in Gdynia.