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Born in Poznań. He left for Sweden in 1969 after the anti-Semitic campaign of the Gomułka regime. He delivered parcels, was a hospital orderly and a crane operator at a construction site. His journalism began with Solidarity - in 1981 he returned to Poland with orders from several newspaper editors. During martial law, he came with help as a truck driver and in the process collected content, which he published in Sweden under the pseudonym Zaremba. He studied the history of ideas. From 1989 to 2019, he was a member of the editorial board of the Dagens Nyheter Swedish daily . In 1997, he publicised the case of forced sterilisations carried out by the Swedish state between 1935 and 1976 on thousands of 'undesirable' citizens, mainly women. The texts resulted in more than 250 million Swedish kronor in compensation being paid to victims of forced sterilisations. He translated (with his wife, the Swedish writer Agneta Pleijel) the poems and essays of Zbigniew Herbert. Translations of reportages (Den polske rörmokaren, Skogen vi ärvde) essays on the history of eugenics (De rena och de andra) and the autobiographical Huset med de två tornen have been published in Polish. Member of the Swedish and Polish sections of the PEN-Club. Doctor honoris causa of the Faculty of Law, Lund University. Winner of the 2019 Ryszard Kapuściński Award for literary reportage.

pic. Vero Kindbald