Dr. Josef’s Little Beauty

＂Two sisters, Leokadia and Helena, nearing the end of their lives, live together in a retirement home not far from Warsaw. With summer in the air, they share memories of their youth, together with their fellow residents. Theirs are no ordinary stories but those of Auschwitz and its aftermath. Helena, at the age of twelve, was a darling of the notorious doctor Josef Mengele, the real-life Nazi officer and physician who was known as the ＂angel of death＂ for the experiments he conducted on prisoners, including twins and siblings＂--

Zyta Rudzka (1964) is an award-winning playwright, novelist, and psychologist from Warsaw. She began her career as a poet in 1989 and debuted in 1991 with the novel White Clichés and became famous for her plays (e.g. The Sugar Bra, 2008 that were translated into Russian, Bulgarian, Italian and German and staged abroad. A masterful writer with a terse and forceful style, her novel Dr Josef’s Little Beauty has recently been revised and reissued (2021) as one of a trilogy of novels that explore old age and the final stage of life. The other two books in the trilogy are A Brief Exchange of Fire (2018, winner of the Gdynia Literary Award, shortlisted for the Nike Literary Award) and Soft Tissues (2020, winner of the City of Warsaw Literary Award).

Antonia Lloyd-Jones has translated works by several of Poland’s leading contemporary novelists and reportage authors, as well as crime fiction, poetry, and children’s books. Her translation of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by 2018 Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk was shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize. She is a mentor for the Emerging Translators’ Mentorship Programme, and former co-chair of the UK Translators Association.