A Little Annihilation

ANNA JANKO is one of the best-known contemporary Polish writers. A poet and literary critic, Janko has twice been nominated for the Nike Literary Prize (2001, 2013). She has also been nominated for the Angelus Central European Literature Award in 2008 and again in 2016, where A Little Annihilation was a finalist. She has won multiple awards and literary prizes including the City of Gdańsk Book of the Year (1981) and the Dresden Independent Writers’ Society Prize (1993) for her entire poetic oeuvre. A film based on A Little Annihilation, under the title A Minor Genocide, was released in 2017. It won major prizes at international film competitions in New York and Calcutta and received the Humanitarian Award in 2019.

PHILIP BOEHM is an American playwright, theater director, and literary translator based in Houston, Texas. His career has zigzagged across languages, borders, and cultural divides. He studied at the State Academy of Theater in Warsaw, Poland, and has directed extensively on both sides of the Atlantic. He has translated more than thirty novels and plays, mostly by German and Polish writers including Herta Müller, Franz Kafka, and Hanna Krall. For this work he has received numerous awards, including fellowships from the NEA and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.