In this short bonus episode, Stanley Bill takes a bird’s-eye view of Polish history, flying through over a thousand years in five minutes to identify the key geopolitical trends.

Produced by Sebastian Leśniewski. 

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Welcome to a Brief History of Poland. In this mini-series of podcasts, Notes from Poland editor-at-large Stanley Bill will be looking at over a thousand years of Polish political and cultural history, from 966 until today.

In this first part of the series, he looks at the year 966 and the symbolic baptism of the early Polish state. He examines the pre-Christian cultures of the region, and asks whether the entry to western Christian Europe was also a moment of cultural colonisation.

Producer: Sebastian Leśniewski 

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To accompany Stanley Bill's interview with Jennifer Croft, we also present a short news update from Notes from Poland deputy editor Monika Prończuk in Warsaw on the Polish prime minister's recent policy statement speech and on the latest ruling of the European Court of Justice on judicial independence in Poland. 

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In the first episode of the Notes from Poland podcast, Stanley Bill talks to Jennifer Croft, the award-winning American translator of Poland's new Nobel laureate, Olga Tokarczuk.

In an in-depth interview with Jennifer Croft, Stanley Bill asks about Olga Tokarczuk's Nobel triumph; the masterpiece The Books of Jacob, which Jennifer is currently translating into English; the earlier novel Flights, for which Jennifer and Tokarczuk won the International Booker Prize in 2018; Jennifer's own writing, including her recently published memoir Homesick; the relation between writing and translation; and Jennifer's path into Polish culture.

Producer: Sebastian Leśniewski

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