Ilona Wiśniewska is a Polish writer and journalist who has been based in the Norwegian High North for the last ten years. She has written three non-fictional books (about Svalbard, Finnmark and West Greenland), as well as several articles about these areas for the biggest Polish newspapers. Her main focus is on people in the North, especially the indigenous peoples and their current situation.
She collects stories, so that they won’t disappear with those who tell them.
The lecture is about Wiśniewska's first book “Białe” (“White”, 2014), a result of five years that she spent in Longyearbyen among people from fifty countries. The book has already had two further subsequent editions in Poland.
Wiśniewska will speak about her working method and how to write reportages about your friends. The lecture also aims to look more broadly at the success of Polish reportage as a genre, during the age of reading crisis which has affected Poland in recent years.