Jan Piekło

Polish journalist and diplomat, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Poland to Ukraine since 2016. Pieklo began his career in literature as a reporter for Gazeta Krakowska in the 1970s where he was the leader of the Solidarnośc group. He was arrested several times in the martial law period and banned to work as a journalist. He covered the revolutionary developments in Romania as a reporter in 1989.

Pieklo reported on the war in the Balkans from 1992 to 1995. He sent his reports from Kosovo, Bosnia, Macedonia, Croatia, Slovenia and Serbia to many Polish, American, Swedish and British newspapers and magazines. His report collections Epitafium dla Jugosławii (An Epitaph for Yugoslavia, 1994) and Węzeł bałkański (The Balkan Knot, 1999) co-authored with Stefan Wilkanowicz represented the concentrated experience of a reporter who sees and feels the pain and the sufferings of the people crippled by war. Another collection of reports titled Moje odkrywanie Ameryki (My Discovery of America, 1997) was published as Pieklo’s column at the Texas newspaper Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He worked in the ENEMO group of monitors in Southern Ukraine during the Orange Revolution (December 2004). Since 2005, he managed PAUCI, the Polish-Ukrainian Cooperation Foundation.

Books in Ukrainian: In September 2015, the Lviv-based Litopys publishing house published the Ukrainian version of Jan Pieklo’s Zapach anioła (The Scent of an Angel), translated by Iryna Senchyshyn. In 2017, Litopys published Jan Pieklo’s poetry collection in two languages, Świat za zakrętem. Kolekcja pocztówek nie wysłanych (The World Behind the Bend: A Collection of Unsent Postcards).