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In 2021, Malgorzata Lebda ran the entire length of the longest river in Poland, the Vistula, from its source in the Beskid Mountains to its mouth at the Baltic Sea - a distance of 1,113 kilometres. She set out to run as a poet, not as an athlete, to use the rhythms of her own body as a means of understanding and connecting to the rhythms of the river's body of water, under threat of environmental ruin. Mer de Glace, which won the Szymborska Award, is the introduction to her remarkable journey. A profound meditation on the porosity, reactivity and receptivity of both the body and the natural world, the collection reveals their deep interdependence.
About the author
Malgorzata Lebda is a Polish poet, fiction writer and ultramarathon runner. She is the author of seven poetry collections, including Mer de Glace which received the prestigious Wislawa Szymborska Prize, and Dunaj. Chyle pola which was awarded the Kościelski Foundation Award. In 2023, Lebda published her prose debut, Lakome (Voracious). The novel has been translated into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Linden Editions, 2025), and a film adaptation will be released in 2027. Her books have been translated into numerous languages, including English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Italian, Czech, Serbian, Ukrainian, Slovenian and Danish. She grew up in a hamlet in the Beskid Mountains and still lives in the countryside, sharing her life between the Beskid Mountains and a meadow house in the Suwalki Gap. She is currently working on her second novel.
