Antoni Libera

Antoni Libera (born 1949, Poland) is a writer, translator, director, expert on the work of Samuel Beckett. Graduate of the University of Warsaw, took his doctorate in the Polish Academy of Sciences. He translated into Polish and published all dramatic works of Samuel Beckett, as well as essays and poems and some of his prose. He takes on Beckett’s plays also as a director, putting them on stage in Poland and abroad: in Great Britain, Ireland, and USA. He has directed over 30 performances till the present day. He has also translated Sophocles’ tragedies as well as works of Shakespeare (Macbeth), Racine (Phèdre), and Oscar Wilde (Salome). He has made new translations of the canon of poetry by Hölderlin and Kawafis. He also translates opera librettos. His novel Madame has become one of the best sellers of the last few decades and has been translated into 20 languages. In 2002 it entered into the very final of the Irish IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. In 2009 he wrote an autobiographical prose entitled Godot i jego cień (Godot and His Shadow), where, adopting a fictional form, he tells of his long standing fascination for the work of Beckett, crowned by his 1978 meeting with the writer in person in Paris.