Claudia Macey-Dare won the eighth annual Polish Institute competition for the best thesis

For the past eight years, the Polish Institute in Prague has been organizing a competition for the best bachelor’s and master’s theses focused on Poland, awarding the Marian Szyjkowski Prize—named after the first professor of Polish language and literature at Charles University.

And we are pleased to announce that this year’s winner in the category of master’s theses from non-Polish studies disciplines is PhD candidate Claudia Macey-Dare, with her thesis Wandering Through the Memories of Post-Socialist Central Europe: How do Olga Tokarczuk’s 'Flights' and Martin M. Šimečka’s 'Príhody Tuláka po Slovensku' use Literary Postmodernism to Address Shifting Identities? In it, the author compares two contemporary Central European literary works—Flights and Príhody tuláka po Slovensku—and, using postmodern analysis, reveals the essence of the process of memory formation in the Central European region and its influence on the fluidity of individual and collective identities in literature.

Congratulations!