Paweł Knut

During the residency, I want to reflect on a new format for my writing. The themes of my work will be related to the war in Ukraine and its significance. The starting point will be to examine my family history and reflect on how the personal/subjective fits into current macro-level struggles. I plan to write a reportage or essay based on an analysis of family memories, i.e. Polish and Ukrainian people caught up in the Second World War and subsequently resettled in the ‘Reclaimed’ Lands. As part of the process, I want to visit places that are important to this story. The trips would allow me to go beyond the context in which I function daily (as a parent/husband/researcher) and look at this history and myself differently (as a Pole-Ukrainian/Ukrainian-Polish). Based on my past experiences and the aid trips I have made to the Belarusian and Ukrainian borders, I know that such trips help me to listen to myself. Over the years, in my writing and activism, I have dealt with issues in which I was not personally involved in. During the residency I would like to reverse these vectors and turn the focus on myself.

I research and describe the phenomenon of discrimination and prejudice. In 2023 I defended my doctoral thesis on hate speech at the Faculty of Artes Liberales, University of Warsaw. I am a graduate of the Polish School of Reportage. I write essays and reportages for, among others, Dwutygodnik, Oko.press and Res Publica Nowa magazines. I am from Słupsk and live in Warsaw.