Agata Izabela Brewer
Writer, scholar, teacher, activist
Buy Agata's books
Winner of the Gournay Prize (2022) and Black Warrior Review's Creative Nonfiction Prize (2019)
Agata’s Latest Publications
Nationalist and tribal cohesion in Ireland, South Africa, the US, and elsewhere often relies on an absence of female and gender-nonconforming bodies in the public life. Staging a vital counter-narrative to global nationalist discourses, this book explores how 20th and 21st-century postcolonial literatures criticize hetero-normative definitions of nationhood across different geopolitical and cultural contexts.
Szczeszak-Brewer delves into the metaphorical currency of male impotence and sexual aggression in nationalist narratives. She examines the place of gender-nonconforming characters in literature from Ireland, the US, Poland, France, Britain, South Africa, and Senegal, in the work of writers including: James Joyce, Witold Gombrowicz, Jean Toomer, Bessie Head, Zoë Wicomb, J. M. Coetzee, Andrea Levy, Patrick McCabe, and David Diop.
Aligning queer and gender perspectives with discussions of white supremacy, this book examines the urgency for contemporary geopolitics to imagine new discourses of community against the backdrop of a rise in neo-nationalisms steeped in homophobic and misogynistic rhetoric.
The Hunger Book: A Memoir from Communist Poland
A memoir about food and motherhood in Communist Poland, The Hunger Book weaves together stories of alcohol addiction and violence against the background of Stalinist-era apartment buildings and lush gardens.
Winner of the 2022 Gournay Prize
“A searing memoir about growing up behind the Iron Curtain, motherhood, addiction, and finding sustenance in the natural world.…A memorable meditation on hunger for food and love, childhood in a totalitarian regime, and resilience.” —Kirkus
"If the ornithology textbook included chapters on resurrection and sadness (as felt through mother death tones) and was part cookbook (the absence we eat and eat), then Birds would be its remarkable introduction. Birds is an acute and moving piece written in the idiom of hunger and the loneliness, survival, suffering and love that light up its limits."
Selah Saterstrom, on one of the chapters of Hunger Book
Reviews
"Empire and Pilgrimage in Conrad and Joyce with its wealth of invigorating readings, will be essential reading. . . . Agata Szczeszak-Brewer is a fresh new voice in modernism."
Modern Fiction Studies
"As it narrates a childhood in communist Poland and an adulthood in Trumpist Indiana, The Hunger Book, a memoir and a cookbook, is a deeply moving meditation on mothering and nurturing, asking how to feed the void a mother's absence creates."
Ania Spyra