Anna kamienska biography

‘Two Darknesses’ selected and translated from the Polish by Tomasz P Krzeszowski and Desmond Graham (Flambard, Newcastle upon Tyne 1994).

Anna Kamieńska (1920-1986) was a prominent member of that particularly distinguished generation of Polish writers who experienced the Second World War as young men and women, many of whom died at the hands of the Nazis.

During the war she taught in underground schools in the Lublin region, having studied Education in Warsaw. She continued her studies after the War and subsequently became deeply involved in the literary life of the Polish capital, working on the important monthly magazine Creativity.

Her first published poems appeared in 1945 and her last in her Two Darknesses: Selected Poems (1984) from which the poems in this current volume are selected and translated. Her Notebooks appeared posthumously in 1987.

Her work was deeply influenced by the War, the Holocaust, and the suffering of Poland, as well as more pe