The Role of Reportage and its Place on the Polish Book Market in the First Decades of the 21st Century

Literary reportage has been one of the most popular genres in Poland in recent years. Works written by Polish and foreign reporters are published by the main publishing houses in the country. A group of prominent reporters such as Ryszard Kapuściński, Hanna Krall and Małgorzata Szejnert is joined by those born in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as debutants. Their books gain literary prizes and are eagerly read by a literary audience. The goal of this article is to explain the growing interest in reportage in Poland in the first decades of the 21st century. Statistical data from reports on the publishing industry, bibliographic data from library catalogs on reportages and non-fiction novels published by Czarne and information on awards for non-fiction novels were used to determine the place of reportage on the Polish book market. In order to describe the specificity of contemporary reportages and answer the question what readers needs they meet, it was decided to analyze reportages by Polish-Swedish author Maciej Zaremba Bielawski who represents investigative journalism and a gonzo-style non-fiction novel by the American journalist Charlie LeDuff