Bruno Schulz

Born on July 12, 1892, in Drohobycz, then part of Austria-Hungary and now in Ukraine, Bruno Schulz was a Polish-language writer, artist, literary critic, and teacher. He spent most of his life in Drohobycz, and that local world—its shops, rooms, seasons, and family life—became the raw material for his strange, luminous fiction.

Schulz is best known for the story collections The Street of Crocodiles (published in Polish as Sklepy cynamonowe, 1934) and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (1937). He was also a gifted visual artist, and some reference works note that his early ambitions leaned as much toward art as literature. Readers and critics have long admired the way his prose blends memory, myth, and surreal imagery.

In 1938, he received the Polish Academy of Literature's Golden Laurel award. His life was cut short during the Nazi occupation: he was killed in Drohobycz on November 19, 1942, and some of his later writings, including the unfinished novel The Messiah, were lost in the Holocaust.