Kinga Wryzsykowska is a French writer of Polish origin whose recent novel, Princesse was published in January by Editions Seuil. A story that blends different genres and forms, Princesse is ultra-contemporary in its thematics, engaging with both the mundane and the fabulous as it straddles Eastern and Western Europe and, like the author herself, bridges the city of Paris with small town Poland. I sat down with Kinga Wryzsykowska to discuss her transition as a scholar of literature to a novelist, her view of genre as the author of a novel that staunchly rejects straightforward categorization, as well as her unconventional decision to include the link to a podcast within the text. The following is a transcription of our conversation, originally in French, which has been translated into English by the interviewer.
A lire en français ici.
What is your professional background? Did you study literature? How did you get into writing?
I believe that when we write, there is a kind of permission we grant ourselves—the permission to write. We can arrive at that point in different ways. As for my own path, I wrote quite freely as a child. I entered writing contests as a child. I was always very disappointed because I felt that things had to happen quickly if they were going to happen at all. I felt, as early as age eight, that if I wrote things, people had to read them. But I put away all my papers in drawers. Anyway…
Later, as a teenager, I wrote a lot—mostly short stories or free-form poetry. Then, after graduating from high school with a focus on literature, I began studying literature. So I attended a classe préparatoire. After that, I enrolled at the École Normale Supérieure. And in a way, I started taking literature more and more seriously. It deserves all that seriousness, but it’s still a seriousness that weighs it down quite a bit. I earned a master’s degree. Then I passed the agrégation in literature, and after that I started working.
During my master’s program, I studied 20th-century literature, focusing on comparative literature. I studied Gombrowicz and Jean Genet, two major influences from that period. I began a dissertation on Cardinal de Retz and La Rochefoucauld, examining the representation of power in their works. Suddenly, there was a radical shift. With Genet and Gombrowicz, I was working on the representation of the body, and now I’m suddenly working on the representation of power. I always circle back to questions that clash. And then, I stopped my thesis fairly quickly. I did three years and then left the university program.
During all those years, I really wasn’t writing freely at all. I no longer felt that I had that permission to write. Writing was reserved for the authors I was studying, the authors I was teaching. After all, while working on my dissertation, I taught 17th-century French literature at the university. I probably started at that point to view it with a sense of gravity, respect, and seriousness. Deep down, there was always a desire to write, but it was a desire I no longer allowed myself to have. I had to, in a way, bring literature down from its pedestal in order to start writing. It took a number of years.
When I stopped teaching, I got involved in theater both as a playwright and as a translator. I worked with theater companies and translated plays—which is, of course, a form of writing, but a different kind, in the service of other authors. There was still a desire to write, a need that was always there. In reality, what allowed me to give myself permission to write was that I decided to step out of that sort of pantheon—my adult pantheon—by returning to my more childlike, more youthful relationship with literature. And so I began to write. The first novel I allowed myself to write is a young adult novel called Mémor, le monde d’après. I suddenly felt empowered to write it because I could completely separate it from my academic background. It was about reconnecting with the joy of telling a story. I think that at the beginning, it really was that—the joy of telling a story. Then came the engagement with language and the work on language, but it was free from everything I had learned and taught at the university.
At that point in my work, there was also the fact that I had a very romantic view of writing. I felt that inspiration had to be somewhat immediate. I’m exaggerating, but I realized, in reality, while working on that first novel, just how much I was improving through writing and working on it. So that first novel took me a long time, a lot of revisions, and went through many different phases before I sent it to a publisher. It was accepted. I was contacted by an editor, and we began working together. And then I wrote a second young adult novel, which was yet another very different experience, and very different in terms of themes. But ultimately, I felt like I’d reached the end of something, and said to myself: Now, I need more freedom. I had themes I wanted to explore that were not intended for young adults. And so, I wrote my first novel, Pate blanche, which was published in 2022 by Seuil.
Deep down, there was always a desire to write, but it was a desire I no longer allowed myself to have. I had to, in a way, bring literature down from its pedestal in order to start writing. It took a number of years.
Critics have described Princesse as a fable or even a feminist manifesto. Could you elaborate on the genre of this work? Do you agree with the description of it as a fable?
Actually, this novel has been described as all sorts of things. It’s been called a feminist manifesto. The term “feminist” suits me perfectly. In a way, how could it be otherwise? After all, there are many different ways to be feminist. There’s something in the thematics—a desire to push boundaries, to examine gender issues, to tackle a specific theme, like conservative, masculinist backlash—that places me within that framework. On the other hand, the term “manifesto” poses a problem for me simply because I’ve chosen fiction. For me, fiction is precisely the space where things come into play. That is to say, it’s not about providing answers; it’s about bringing things into play, setting them in motion, and also exploring the realms of disorder, transformation, and metamorphosis.
As for the question of genre, what interests me more is the question of form. It overlaps with genre to some extent, but not entirely. It doesn’t fully encompass it. A fable? Well, there’s the use of animals. I think people immediately looked to fables for inspiration. I do enjoying borrowing elements from the universe of the fable. Then, there’s been a lot of talk about the transformations in my novel. Some people also use the term dystopia. It’s not the question of genre that’s key to my writing. It’s not really a question I ask myself while writing. I do, however, ask myself about form, and I strive to give it as fluid a shape as possible.
It’s also a book in which I explore all kinds of boundaries—whether they’re boundaries between categories like masculine and feminine, or boundaries between different genres or literary forms. I love things that get out of control, things that naturally draw from other sources. There is a framework. I always set up a framework, but to better break out of it. Princess begins with a Chapter Zero and ends with a Chapter Zero Prime. I like to think of that structure as a frame around my novel that could almost be the frame of a door or a mirror. But inside of that, you don’t know exactly where you’re entering. I try to start from familiar ground because I feel that a reader might have the sensation of recognizing things, and thus feel somewhat at ease. I create the familiar—the story can be familiar—so that I can then better subvert it, change it, and transform the familiar into something either more threatening or surprising. So that the reader’s reactions are never completely taken for granted.
For me, fiction is precisely the space where things come into play. That is to say, it’s not about providing answers; it’s about bringing things into play, setting them in motion, and also exploring the realms of disorder, transformation, and metamorphosis.
Why did you choose a giant rabbit as Barbara’s pet? What does the rabbit symbolize? And what do animals in general symbolize?
I’d like to answer you with a quip: they represent nothing other than themselves, which is already a lot. I’m not going to provide a user’s manual because, ultimately, it would be just as false or just as incomplete as whatever the reader might project onto the rabbit. I tried to write these characters as canvases for the projections of others It’s very common for readers who have their own answers to ask me what the rabbit means, as if my answer were worth more than theirs. In any case, the rabbit isn’t the name of a single thing. It isn’t a symbol.
On the other hand, I can tell you how this rabbit came to me. At a time when a lot of literary work focuses on animals in the wild, what interested me was the domestic animal. I was interested in working on something that contains its own contradiction. On the one hand, the term “animal,” which can evoke a form of bestiality, a form of wild life, and then suddenly, this word that comes along to restrict it, to frame it, to bring it back into the home. I really liked the idea of the domestic animal. The presence of an animal in the home gives rise to a certain dynamic between human and beast, which plays out very differently from encountering an animal in the forest. It involves a relationship of domination. What is the name of this relationship? It’s already difficult to name. People say: the master and the pet. There you go, a relationship of domination, the master and the animal. These days, there are a lot of projections onto animals. Some people won’t say they’re their pet’s master, but rather their pet’s dad or mom. These are things I’ve heard myself when talking to pet owners
Those dynamics can also be reversed. Because the animal can take the upper hand in a situation where the human is in the opposite position. I was interested in exploring these different dynamics. I’ve had a dog for a short while now, and I find that having this animal—being confronted with an animal’s presence in the house—is no small matter. I haven’t always liked what the animal has brought out in me. I don’t really like being the owner or the mistress of an animal. I find that it creates a relationship that might seem quite obvious—something you don’t need to think about. In reality, it’s much more complex.
And why a rabbit? Precisely for that reason. Because a dog might have seemed too obvious. We know that a dog can turn vicious. There was something about the rabbit that I found quite unsettling from the start. The rabbit evokes a nightmarish world. The rabbit is Alice in Wonderland. It’s the animal that takes you to the other side, that leads you into the burrow where Alice follows and drags her toward something hellish.
I can also tell you about another pretty funny source—one I’d forgotten about but that my partner reminded me of when he read the book. He said, “Do you remember that Polish Ministry of Health ad campaign we watched together in 2017?” That was right around the time I started working on Princesse. There was a campaign where the Polish Ministry of Health made a video with lots of rabbits, like a bunch of rabbits hopping around on the grass. There’s a voiceover that says: “To live a healthy life, live like rabbits. Eat vegetables, carrots, move around, jump.” You see the little rabbits hopping—they’re real rabbits. And of course, “breed like rabbits.” It was a public service announcement aimed at giving the birth rate in Poland a little boost. One of the questions that interested me was, of course, the issue of being assigned a reproductive role. I felt that the rabbit embodied those themes.
And then there’s the fact that the rabbit—it’s something that scares me a little. It haunts my nightmares. It’s sort of an animal of both dreams and nightmares. There’s a Lynchian quality to it, a sense of magic. To put it simply, the rabbit embodied a number of my fantasies about a pet.
You wrote a book titled Princesse. Why did you choose that title? Does it refer to something beyond the character of Barbara Lis?
More immediately, there is Gombrowicz’s Yvonne, Princess of Burgundy, which inspired the title. There is this social position, this place in society to which one is effectively assigned and which is equated with passivity. The princess, since her place is her role and she must remain there, is equated with immobility. There you have it: the princess isn’t where she goes; she is where she is placed, where she is set.
In the novel, it is also the name Barbara Lis gives to her rabbit, which is connected to the main character. Their relationship evolves throughout the novel, but at times—since they both have different-colored eyes—it takes on a mirror-like quality. The title “Princess,” which is the title of my novel but is also an aristocratic title, is very precisely the place where we find ourselves, and where we have been placed, set down, and which may seem like a thoroughly appealing place.
You were talking about fables earlier. We’re obviously in the realm of fairy tales here. Whenever there’s a princess, there’s a prince charming; whenever there’s a princess, there’s a sense of incompleteness. The princess is always waiting for someone to make her into a princess. So she is a figure of receptivity, of passivity. I’m not talking about Barbara Lis here; I’m simply talking about the role created by the very word “princess.”
The city of Paris seems to play an important role in the text. How do you view the city of Paris, and especially the comparison between Western Europe and Eastern Europe?
The novel is divided into three parts. The chapters in the first part are in French, and the novel is set in Paris at that time. In the second part, it’s in Polish, and the story takes place in southern Poland. And in the third part, which is still set in Poland, the chapter titles are in Latin, since this is a section where religion takes precedence over all other languages.
The character of Barbara Lis is both the novel’s main character and yet she is always in the background, a bit like a princess. She is moved from one place to another. She is the only character whose mind the reader never enters. The reader can enter the minds of the other characters—there are internal focalizations at many points—but never into Barbara Lis’s own mind. She is a character who moves from Paris to Poland. From a major city like Paris, with all that Paris represents in the Western world, to a small village in southern Poland. So there is a stark contrast, a world that seems to shrink dramatically from one setting to the other.
Barbara Lis never really expresses what she’s feeling. It’s kind of funny—some readers tell me, “Well, she was doing just fine in France, so why did she leave for that horrible Poland, for that little village?” Reading “She was doing just fine in France,” is a projection on the part of the reader, because in reality, we know nothing from Barbara Lis’s perspective. We know she leaves that place at some point. People perceive the French episode in Paris, Barbara Lis’s life, positively, because it certainly has all the hallmarks of modernity. She works at a large company. She’s a woman who holds a fairly high-ranking position there, a single woman who manages her sex life, makes her own decisions about it, and uses dating apps. When she goes to Poland, she moves toward the traditional end of the spectrum, even the very conservative and religious end of the spectrum. I constructed these two worlds in a sort of opposition, which for me also gets turned on its head. First of all, because I wanted to conceive my fiction as a door or a mirror. It’s an inverted mirror, but a mirror nonetheless.
When I construct my Poland, the only thing geographical about it is the name. I’m exaggerating. It does have geographical elements. It’s the country where I was born, that I know, and about which I perhaps feel more qualified to speak. It’s a conservative country where neoconservatives have been in power for a number of years, with measures that have been taken particularly regarding women’s bodies and the issue of abortion. But ultimately, these are the same kinds of laws that parts of the United States are moving toward or have already adopted, where there is a neoconservative—or even reactionary—discourse that is highly violent toward women’s bodies.
With Trump, of course, but also with quite a few Western leaders. Poland is the perfect example. But I hope the reader doesn’t view it with too much distance. I think there’s reason to draw parallels with the rest of the world and realize that this Poland on the other end of the spectrum—well, we might already be there.
I really wanted to see how a single existence, a single life, can generate so many different and contradictory narratives.
What prompted you to incorporate the podcast into the text? Why combine these two formats? Why did you include that audio clip of Donald Trump?
Since I’m creating a character, Barbara Lis, who serves as a canvas for the projections of others, I was really interested in seeing how anyone can take ownership of her story. And how, depending on one’s ideology, people can transform and interpret her story in one way or another. So I really wanted to see how a single existence, a single life, can generate so many different and contradictory narratives. Among these narratives, she becomes a sort of muse for conservatives, but not only that, since she also becomes a feminist icon. So she is portrayed in contradictory ways following a dramatic event that brings one of the storylines to a close.
Earlier we talked about fables and fairy tales. Personally, I like to echo the words of Gombrowicz, who described himself as a relentless realist. He had this way of examining reality—of engaging with it so relentlessly, of trying to capture it so relentlessly—that it became amplified, grotesque. I also like to work that way. The podcast is also because I like to work with different forms; in my novel, you’ll hardly ever find direct speech. But [the podcast] is a highly theatricalized form. I could have written a sort of play. That’s what the podcast is. Except that, on the other hand, I also wanted to pursue my own interests.
For me, my relationship with fiction is one of playfulness. It’s a realm of total freedom. So, there’s a podcast—why not record it? What’s stopping me? I really loved those shows when I was little, called Where Are They Now? There was a show in France where the producers started by filming a second-grade class. They’d catch up with the kids every five years. I loved that as a kid. Every now and then, when a novel ends, you want to know what happens next. The podcast in the book is both written and recorded as if it were a real documentary podcast with actors. So, I think the audio itself is great because it feels authentic.
That was also what I wanted to explore: what is true, what isn’t true, what do we believe in? Those were questions that really interested me. The podcast struck me as the format that will continue to evolve, presenting itself as a sort of outgrowth of reality. It seemed like the logical format to tell the Where Are They Now? story of the characters in my novel. There are two endings in Princesse. So, there’s a first ending. And then there’s a final section that’s about forty pages long, but which is like an outgrowth of that. A way of ending twice. In fact, the ending is overtaken by another ending.
Princesse is now available from Seuil.
Born in Warsaw, Kinga Wyrzykowska followed her parents to France in the early 1980s. After studying Modern Literature at the École Normale Supérieure, she taught at the University of Saint-Étienne and began a thesis which she abandoned to turn to theater and audiovisual work. She wrote two documentary films and translated plays before publishing two young adult books with Bayard: Memor, le monde d’après in 2015 and De nos propres ailes in 2017. Patte blanche, her first novel published in 2022, was awarded the Prix Françoise Sagan in 2023. It was also translated into Polish and published by Nowela. Her new novel Princesse was published in January 2026 by Seuil.
Cristina Politano is a writer from New Jersey. Her essays and fiction appear in Identity Theory, The Dodge, and La Piccioletta Barca, among other places. Twitter/X and Instagram/BlueSky: @monalisavitti.
minor literature[s] 