Andrzej Sapkowski biography

Andrzej Sapkowski was born on the 21st of June 1948 in Lodz, Poland. Sapkowski studied economy and business, but the success of his fantasy cycle about the sorcerer Geralt de Riv turned him into a bestselling writer and he is now one of Poland's most famous and successful authors, selling more in his own country than Stephen King or Michael Crichton. Sapkowski has won five Zajdel Awards, including three for short stories Lesser Evil in 1990, Sword of Destiny in 1992 and In a Bomb Crater in 1993, and two for the novels Blood of the Elves in 1994 and Narrenturm in 2002.

"You have to comprehend that I've been doing fantasy for twenty years. When I began to write in Poland there was no one, I was the pioneer. That is not an immodesty, it is the truth: I had to create Polish fantasy. I believed to part from my readings and my knowledge of the genre, because the Polish reader, extremely discerning, was not going to accept hybrids of the middle road between Fantasy and other genres, or a simple copy of Tolkien. S/he was searching for something new, special. And that eagerness for creating something new, special, that is what drove me to write."