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Julia Hartwig - Writing children's literature (86/100)

94 views · Published 18 October 2017 · 2:06 · Indexed 21 September 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2017 · Entertainment

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To listen to more of Julia Hartwig’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFyU9ehLuouVmm_Ocec3PUd8

Julia Hartwig (1921-2017) was a Polish poet, essayist, translator and author of children's books. She studied at universities in Warsaw, Lublin and Kraków. Czesław Miłosz called her 'the grande dame of Polish poetry'. [Listener: Andrzej Wolski; date recorded: 2010]

TRANSCRIPT: At that time, my husband and I wrote... when our child was just a few years old... keeping up with her development, from about six to nine – by the age of nine she was already a very bright young lady. However, before then, we'd already written three books, one of which had been awarded a prize by Nasza Księgarnia, and which described the life of a little girl in Warsaw, in a city which was a little fantastic, there were... conversations with a horse that clearly couldn't talk but talked with this little girl anyway, and there were some quite funny anecdotes... interspersed with short poems. I have to say that Krzysztof Pomian surprised me once by reciting all of these poems – Artur had written them – they are amusing little poems, and he recited them all from start to finish. I thought to myself, well here's an odd child, but they had a daughter and she was the one who was reading this book. So we wrote, yes, we wrote plays for children. The book was, of course, addressed to our child, but to be honest, the parents had to support the child as well as the house and so they grabbed every opportunity to make a little money by writing. So, among other things, there were these children's books which were popular, were read, and they secured a place for me to the point that when I went to a meeting with teachers of Polish that I'd been invited to attend, when it was over, one lady of a certain age said to me, 'When I was a child, I used to read your books. The little girl in them was called Poziomka, and I was very put out that my parents weren't calling me Poziomka'. I was terribly embarrassed that such an admission had been made but I was also pleased, I have to admit, because this meant that someone somewhere had read this.

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