MORSKA Izabela

Born on 24 August 1961 in Gdynia; daughter of the civil servant Stanisław Filipiak and the dentist Jadwiga, née Sicińska. She was a pupil at Grammar School No. 2 in Gdynia, completing her advanced secondary education in 1980. She then took a degree in Polish philology at the University of Gdansk (UG). During her studies she qualified as a theatre instructor and ran an amateur theatre company where she staged, among other things, a play inspired by the poetry of Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska and Urszula Benka, as well as her own poetic drama about witches. She was awarded a master's degree from UG in 1986 for her thesis Śmierć jako gwałt w poezji Stanisława Grochowiaka (Death as an Act of Violence in the Poetry of Stanisław Grochowiak). The work was supervised by Prof. Maria Janion. The same year, she left for France on a tourist visa in order to learn French at a school run by Alliance Française. Towards the end of the school year, she applied for political asylum both to the French government and to the US Embassy. Her application was accepted in both cases, but in November 1987 she opted to leave for the United States of America. She worked in various jobs, including in the administration of the newspaper Nowy Dziennik and as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She subsequently received disability benefit and also contributed to column Ze świata kultury (From the world of culture) in Nowy Dziennik. In 1989, she took a course in improvised theatre and stage writing at the school of the HB Studio in New York. The following year she studies visual arts at the New York Institute of Technology and then the feminist history of English-language literature (women's studies) at CUNY Graduate Center in 1991. She made her debut in 1990 with the short story Zdobycz (Trophy), which was published in the Paris-based periodical "Kontakt" (no. 9/10). Her short stories, poems, articles and reviews subsequently appeared in publications including the "Przegląd Polski" supplement of "Nowy Dziennik" (New York, 1990-2001), as well as the Poland-based periodicals "bruLion" (1991-1992), "Czas Kultury" (1990, 1991, 1992, and 1995), "Odra" (1991, 1992, 1994, and 1996), the "Ex Libris" supplement of "Życie Warszawy" (1995-1996), and the journal of the Women's Movement Information Centre bulletin "Biuletyn OŚKi" (1998-2000). She returned to Poland in 1996, joining the Association of Polish Writers (SPP) in 1997. Starting that year (until 2000), she taught courses in creative writing on the postgraduate programme in gender studies at the Institute of Applied Social Sciences at the University of Warsaw (UW). She published articles, reviews and poems in periodicals including "Res Publica Nowa" (1997-2000), as well as regular columns in magazines including the Polish edition of "Marie Claire" (1998-99), the women-focused "Wysokie Obcasy" supplement of "Gazeta Wyborcza", including here the series Twórcze pisanie dla młodych panien (Creative writing for young ladies), "Pani" (2000-01), "Activist" (2001-02), and "Twój Styl" (in the book section, Książki, 2001/02). In 1999, she directed and staged a performance by the female studies participating in her creative writing course at the Centre for Contemporary Art (CSW) at the Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw. Between 2001 and 2007 she taught creative writing on the Postgraduate Programme in Literary and Artistic Studies (Studium Literacko-Artystyczne) at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. She left for the USA again in 2003, this time on a Kościuszko Foundation scholarship to work as a visiting scholar at the Institute of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. After being awarded a doctoral degree in 2005 from the Institute of Literary Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IBL PAN) for her dissertation Maria Komornicka i kreacje odmienności (Maria Komornicka's Constructions of Otherness), which was supervised by Prof. Maria Janion, the following year she was an affiliated scholar in the gender studies programme in the Beatrice Bain Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley. Between 2007 and 2009 she studied at Mills College in Oakland and was awarded a Master of Fine Arts in English Language and Creative Writing. In 2009, she was appointed lecturer at the Department of English-Language Literature at the Chair of English-Language Cultures and Literatures at the Institute of English and American Studies at UG. In 2010 she established the Foundation Pisarze dla Pokoju/Writers for Peace, which operated actively for only one year owing to her poor health (the Foundation was removed from the register in 2015). She formally changed her surname to Morska in 2013. She was awarded a habilitation degree from UG in 2017 for her study Glorious Outlaws: Debt as a Tool in Contemporary Postcolonial Fiction. From 2017, she edited the blog Danciger Bleter (see link), which is run by the Jewish Studies Research Group at UG, and from 2022 the UG literary magazine Polish Gothic: Literature, Art, Politics, and the Uncanny (see link). The same year, she started publishing column pieces on the portal Gdańsk Miasto Literatury (Gdansk City of Literature). In 2022, she was made professor at UG and joined the Council of the Faculty of Philology at UG. She joined the following associations and societies: Utopian Studies Society-Europe (2017), Unia Literacka (Literary Union; 2020), Badacze i Badaczki Na Granicy (Researchers at the Border; 2021), the International Border Studies Center (2021), the Polish Association for the Study of English (PASE; 2022), the European Society for the Study of English (2022) and the International Crime Fiction Association (2022). She was awarded the Julian Tuwim Literary Prize lifetime achievement award in 2018. She was the recipient of the Visegrad Fellowship (Petőfi Literary Museum, Budapest, 2021), a fellowship from the Central European University (for the Open Society Archives, Budapest, 2022), and the City of Gdansk Cultural Grant (2023). She lives in Gdansk.