Andrzej Stasiuk (pronounced: [ˈand͡ʐɛj ˈstaɕuk]; born 25 September 1960 in Warsaw, Poland) is one of the most successful and internationally acclaimed contemporary Polish writers, journalists and literary critics.

After a collection of Wiersze miłosne i nie ("Love and Non-Love Poems", 1994), Stasiuk's bestselling first full-length novel Biały kruk (published in English translation in 2000 as White Raven) appeared in 1995 and consolidated his position among the most successful authors in post-communist Poland.

In 1986, long before his literary breakthrough, Stasiuk left his native Warsaw and withdrew to the small hamlet of Czarne in the Beskids, a secluded part of the Carpathian mountain range in the south of Poland.

While White Raven had a straight adventure plot, Stasiuk's subsequent writing has become increasingly impressionistic and concentrated on atmospheric descriptions of his adopted home, the provincial south-east of Poland and Europe, and the lives of its inhabitants.

Dukla marked Stasiuk's breakthrough in Germany and helped him build his most appreciative readership outside Poland, although a number of his books have been translated into several other languages.

My God, what would I be doing in France ..."[2] Stasiuk himself cites Marek Hłasko as a major influence; critics have compared his style of stream of consciousness travel literature to that of Jack Kerouac.

[3] A certain exception to the stylistic preferences in Stasiuk's more recent work is the 1998 novel Dziewięć ("Nine"), which is set in Warsaw and records the changes affecting urban Polish society after the collapse of communism.

Apart from (semi-) fictional writing, Stasiuk also tried his hand at literary criticism (in Tekturowy samolot / "Cardboard Aeroplane", 2000) and quasi-political essayism on the notion of Central Europe (together with the Ukrainian writer Yuri Andrukhovych) in Moja Europa.

Stasiuk's least typical work is Noc ("Night"), subtitled "A Slavo-Germanic medical tragifarce", a stageplay commissioned by the Schauspielhaus of Düsseldorf, Germany, for a theatre festival to celebrate the enlargement of the European Union in 2004.

In the guise of a grotesque crime story, Stasiuk presents two imaginary nations, symbolising Eastern and Western Europe and easily recognisable as Poles and Germans, who are entangled in an adversarial but at the same time strangely symbiotic relationship.