The House of Orion by Julia Fiedorczuk follows a female protagonist, Elisa, who abandons the city and all her complex relationships with self, family, and friends to go “to the woods”. Unlike Thoreau, she finds the world there: the many languages and nationalities of refugees migrating along the Poland/Belarus border through old growth forests that once covered the entire European plain. Fiedorczuk experiments with perspective at the planetary scale, coming close to the almost microscopic dimensions of life in the forest and then zooming out to include the cosmic or even metaphysical perspectives, giving poignancy to Elisa’s political and social isolation. Originally published in Polish as Dom Oriona by Wydawnictwo Literackie (Kraków, 2023), the novel is translated into English by Anna Zaranko with a new foreword by Katarzyna Kasia and cover artwork inspired by the text by Alexandra Grant.

Julia Fiedorczuk is a writer, poet, translator, and professor at Warsaw University, where she co-founded the Environmental Humanities Center. Her work explores the relationship between human beings and their planetary environment and emphasises the world-making power of literature. She authored short story collections and novels, including Pod Słońcem (Under the Sun) and Dom Oriona (The House of Orion) as well as six poetry volumes, the most recent of which is Glif (Glyph). She also published essays, including Cyborg w ogrodzie: wprowadzenie do ekokrytyki (A Cyborg in the Garden: Introduction to Ecocriticism) and, as a co-author, Ecopoetics. She was nominated for the Nike Literary Award in 2016 and twice nominated for the Julian Tuwim Lifetime Achievement Award. She is the laureate of the 2018 Szymborska Prize for Psalmy (Psalms). Oxygen, a volume of her selected poems translated by Bill Johnston, was longlisted for the 2016 National Translation Award in the United States. Julia Fiedorczuk has performed at numerous literary festivals in Poland and across the world; her work has been translated into over 20 languages, including English, German, Spanish, Swedish, Serbian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Chinese and Georgian. She is a columnist of Polityka, a popular Polish weekly and a frequent guest of poetry shows on the Polish radio. 

Marcin Orliński is a poet, literary critic, and editor. He has published six volumes of poetry, his most recent work being Późne Słońce. Other publications include a collection of short prose pieces titled Zabiegi  and a book of literary criticism called Płynne przejścia. He won the Adam Włodek Award in 2016, was nominated for the K.I. Gałczyński Poetry Award “Orpheus” in 2018 and 2024, and was nominated for the Literary Award of the Capital City of Warsaw in 2024. Orliński’s writing has appeared in notable Polish publications such as “Gazeta Wyborcza,” “Rzeczpospolita,” “Newsweek,” “Tygodnik Powszechny,” and “Twórczość.” His poems have been translated into several languages, including English, German, French, Swedish, Ukrainian, Russian, Czech, and Slovenian. From 2020 to 2024 he served as the deputy editor-in-chief of “Przekrój,” the oldest Polish magazine on culture and society. 

Alexandra Grant is a contemporary mixed media artist whose body of work includes painting, sculpture, photography, installation, video, and publishing. Her art is characterized by an interdisciplinary fascination with language as image, particularly in embodying the written word. Described as a “writer who writes with materials” and “a radical collaborator,” Grant engages with the work of writers, poets, philosophers and linguists including Sophocles, Wisława Szymborska, Michael Joyce, Hélène Cixous, and Keanu Reeves. Grant has exhibited in museums and galleries around the world, and her works are in museum collections such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, and others. Grant co-founded X Artists’ Books and runs the grantLOVE project, which supports artists and arts education through the sale of art editions.

The House of Orion is published as part of X Artists’ Books’ X Topics (XT) series, a collection of single-author books focused on the writing and ideas of marginalized voices.