Edmund Niziurski

Edmund Niziurski (July 10, 1925 – October 9, 2013) was a popular Polish writer, author of numerous humorous novels and stories for children, adolescents and adults, written with a specific kind of irony. He was also a sociologist and a lawyer.

Niziurski was born into a middle-class family in Kielce, Poland; his father, Stanisław, was a civil servant. He studied at the Jan Sniadecki Middle School in Kielce, but did not complete his education there because of the German and Soviet attack on Poland. In September 1939, he was evacuated to Hungary together with his family but returned to the area of Kielce in 1940. During World War II, he attended an illegal high school in Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski, where he graduated in 1943. Niziurski spent the war in the village of Jeleniec, near Ostrowiec.

After the war, he studied law at Lublin Catholic University and Jagiellonian University, in the late 1940s took up sociology and journalism. In 1947 he completed the legal studies and in the same year married Zofia Barbara Kowalska. He lived in Kielce, then in Katowice and finally, in 1952, moved to Warsaw, where he has been living since then. He worked as a journalist for Wiez weekly, at the same time writing his own books. Niziurski was a member of the Association of Polish Writers (Stowarzyszenie Pisarzy Polskich). He was a great man and an award-winning novelist. His younger brother, Mirosław Niziurski was a Polish composer, music critic, professor of musical arts and rector of the Higher Pedagogical School in Kielce. Unfortunately died in 2015.

Niziurski made his first appearance in print in 1944 with a poem published in Biuletyn Informacyjny, a magazine issued by the Home Army. After the war, he cooperated with several magazines, such as Płomyk, Świat Młodych, and also with the Polish Radio, for which he wrote radio plays. In the course of the time, his books for children and adolescents have become very popular, while the novels written for adult readers are much less well-known. In 1975 he was awarded the Order of the Smile and in 2008 received the Medal for Merit to Culture - Gloria Artis.

Niziurski wrote dynamic, witty and humorous stories mostly revolving around the everyday school life of his teenage characters, but also containing elements of sensation and, in his later works, science-fiction.

Niziurski died, aged 88, in Warsaw.

• Księga urwisów (The Book of the Brats), Iskry, Warsaw, 1954
• Siódme wtajemniczenie (The Seventh Initiation),
• Sposób na Alcybiadesa (How To Get Alcibiades), Iskry, Warsaw 1964, also a 1998 movie Spona at the Internet Movie Database
• Niewiarygodne przygody Marka Piegusa (Unbelievable Adventures of Marek Piegus)