"Polish Boys" is a story of young bohemian-intellectuals who have settled in old dilapidated buildings and who follow their ideals. The plot unfolds in socialist Poland but space and time are irrelevant and can be seen as an allegory.
"Polish Boys" is about the confidence of youth and about aspirations for beauty and truth, how high expectations meet reality, how some people bend and deviate and some donʼt. Adam, Sulisław, Teofilis and Jerzy grow up together and become influential figures in Warsawʼs art and literary circles. They set up the radical cultural newspaper Płaszcze and try to transform the society surrounding them. Their radicalism is challenged and not least by the convenient choices offered by the establishment. The same choices are present in their private lives: the unpredictability of free love or the security of a family.
"Polish Boys" is a bildungsroman for the whole generation inspired by the cultural group ZA/UM in Estonia. The author, who was a member of the group, writes from her personal experience with warmth and compassion, which makes the novelʼs tonality both universal and human.
This project has been funded with support from the Creative Europe Programme of the European Commission.
The writer and literary critic Made Luiga (b. 1966), who writes under the pseudonym Mudlum, began to publish her creative output through her involvement with the literary group ZA/UM and its culture and society blog. Her debut story collection Tõsine inimene (A Serious Person, 2014) earned the instant attention of critics, and was also nominated for the Estonian annual literary prize. In 2017 she was awarded the prestigious Friedebert Tuglas Short Story Award.
Mudlum’s first novel Poola poisid (Polish Boys, 2019) won Estonia’s highest annual prose award and the 2020 European Union Prize for Literature.
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