About the Dictionary

The digital biobibliographical dictionary Polish Writers and Literary Scholars of the 20th and 21st centuries is a research project that has been carried out by the Department of Contemporary Literature Documentation of the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IBL PAN) since 2018. It features entries on around 2,300 authors who began their careers as writers, both in Poland and abroad, after 1918. It includes details of poets, prose writers, playwrights, literary critics, theatre critics, essayists, reportage writers, translators, literary historians, and literary theorists.

The database made available here presents factual information relating to the biographies and writings of several generations of authors and literary scholars active over the last 100 years, offering basic information that is crucial to many activities in the humanities and culture more generally. The target audience includes researchers from various fields, from literary history through anthropology to sociology and the history of culture, as well as students, teachers and general readers who require scientifically verified knowledge on contemporary Polish literature.

Each of the entries published here includes a biography in the form of a short factual sketch featuring the most important information relating to an author’s life, a bibliography of their works, and a list of the most important studies relating to that person. See more See more

The database on Polish Writers and Literary Scholars of the 20th and 21st centuries marks the culmination of the output of the Institute of Literary Research in the field of dictionaries of literary biography, while also testifying to the ongoing methodological advances in these fields whose origins can be traced back to the 1950s at the Department of Contemporary Literature Documentation See more See more

The history of the dictionary

Selection of entries

Authorship of entries

Structure of the entries

Technical parameters for the editing of entries

Archive of authors’ questionnaires

Selected biobibliographical sources

List of abbreviations