Władysław Stanisław Reymont

Born in 1867 in Kobiele Wielkie, he came to literature by an unusual path. Before becoming a full-time writer, he worked in several trades, including as a railway employee and as an actor, and those firsthand experiences helped give his fiction its strong sense of place and everyday detail.

He is most celebrated for The Peasants (Chłopi), a four-volume novel published in the early 20th century that follows rural life through the changing seasons. He also wrote The Promised Land, a major novel about the industrial city of Łódź and the harsh energy of rapid capitalism.

In 1924, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, with The Peasants singled out as his great national epic. He died in Warsaw in 1925, and he remains one of the central figures of Polish fiction.