Foucault in Warsaw

In 1958, Michel Foucault arrived in Poland to work on his thesis—a work that eventually came to be published as The History of Madness. While he was there, he became involved with a number of members of the gay community, including a certain “Jurek,” who eventually lead the secret police directly to Foucault’s hotel room, causing his subsequent exit from Poland. That boy’s motivations & true identity were hidden among secret police documents for decades, until Remigiusz Ryziński stumbled upon the right report & uncovered the truth about the whole situation.

Nominated for the Nike Literary Award, Foucault in Warsaw reconstructs a vibrant, engaging picture of gay life in Poland under communism—from the joys found in secret nightclubs, to the fears of not knowing who was a secret informant.

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Sean Gasper Bye is a translator of Polish literature into English, focusing on contemporary literary fiction & reportage. His translations have won the EBRD Literary Prize & the Asymptote Close Approximations Prize, & been shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, a National Jewish Book Award, the Sami Rohr Prize, & the National Translation Award. He has been a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow & Translator-in-Residence at Princeton University. Sean also mentors emerging translators through the National Centre for Writing & the Yiddish Book Center. He lives in Philadelphia.