The Polityka Historical Awards are among the oldest and most prestigious distinctions available to authors of historical works in Poland. This year, one of the laureates is Dr Marcelina Jakimowicz, Assistant Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies within the Institute of History at the University of Rzeszów.

From 2018 to 2024, in collaboration with Prof. Małgorzata Ruchniewicz (University of Wrocław) and Prof. Piotr Ciochoracki (Institute of History, University of Wrocław), Dr Jakimowicz was involved in a research project funded under the National Programme for the Development of the Humanities, implemented by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education. The project was entitled A Critical Edition of Selected Memoirs and Testimonies from the Siberian Collection of the Scientific Archive of the Polish Ethnological Society in Wrocław.

The outcome of this initiative is the publishing series Library of the Deportee: 20th-Century Testimonies, consisting of 17 volumes and featuring the personal accounts of 35 individuals. These publications present a vivid mosaic of Polish fates in the East, marked by the experience of Soviet repression.

In 2024, the series was awarded the Marian Turski Historical Prize, Poland’s oldest historical award, presented by Polityka weekly in the category of source publications.

Dr Marcelina Jakimowicz

Ethnologist and cultural studies scholar, graduate of the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Wrocław. Her research interests include the anthropology of memory (with particular focus on the problematization of memory), biography studies, and the ethnography of Eastern European countries. She has conducted fieldwork in Belarus, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Ukraine. Author of numerous scholarly and popular-science articles, co-editor of ten publications, and author of the monograph A World That No Longer Exists: Polish and Ukrainian Biographical Narratives (1918–1956).