Witoszek, Nina

views updated

WITOSZEK, Nina

(Nina FitzPatrick, a joint pseudonym)

PERSONAL:

Born in Poland.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Centre for Development and the Environment, Box 1116 Blindern, 0317 Oslo, Norway. Agent—Antony Harwood, Antony Harwood Ltd., 103 Walton St., Oxford OX2 6 EB, England. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer. Centre for Development and the Environment, Oslo, Norway, research professor.

WRITINGS:

UNDER NAME NINA WITOSZEK

(With Patrick Sheeran) Talking to the Dead: A Study of Irish Tradition, Rodopi (Atlanta, GA), 1997.

(Editor) Nature Mythologies: From the Eddas to Ecophilosophy, Pax Vorlag (Oslo, Norway), 1998.

(Editor, with Andrew Brennan) Philosophical Dialogues: Arne Näess and the Progress of Ecophilosophy, Rowman & Littlefield (Lanham, MD), 1999.

(Editor, with Bo Stråth) The Postmodern Challenge: East and West Perspectives, Rodopi (Atlanta, GA), 1999.

(Editor, with Lars Trägârdh) Culture and Crisis: The Case of Germany and Sweden, Berghahn Books (New York, NY), 2002.

Also editor, with Andrew Brennan and Peder Anker, of Environmental Ethics and the Humanist Legacy; editor, Moral Communities and the Challenges of Modernisation: A Comparative Approach. Contributor of scholarly studies to periodicals in Europe and America.

WITH PATRICK SHEERHAN, UNDER JOINT PSEUDONYM NINA FITZPATRICK

Fables of the Irish Intelligentsia, Fourth Estate (London, England), 1991, Penguin Books (New York, NY), 1993.

The Loves of Faustyna, Penguin Books (New York, NY), 1995.

Daimons, Justin, Charles (Boston, MA), 2003.

SIDELIGHTS:

Nina FitzPatrick is the joint pseudonym of writers Nina Witoszek and the late Patrick Sheerhan. The two authors quietly collaborated on three projects and published the first with such complete anonymity that reviewers hailed "FitzPatrick" as a strong new voice in Irish letters. In fact, Witoszek is not Irish at all, but a Polish-born professor living in Norway who writes scholarly monographs on ecology and land use.

Witoszek and Sheerhan's first collaboration was a collection of short stories, Fables of the Irish Intelligentsia. The work turns a mordant eye on Irish eccentricities, both within the church community and amongst its scholars. A Publishers Weekly critic found the collection "uniformly excellent," noting that even though rumors abounded that FitzPatrick was neither Irish nor a woman, "the stories reflect a sensibility not only female but patently Irish." In the Review of Contemporary Fiction, Eamonn Wall called FitzPatrick a "lively new Irish writer with an attitude." Wall concluded that "Nina FitzPatrick's short stories are entertaining, original, and fiendishly clever."

The Loves of Faustyna is set in Poland in the 1960s, when communist rule was at its most harsh, and observes the effect of the repression on personal relationships. A Publishers Weekly correspondent called the work "a novel that trains a wistful, intelligent gaze at someone trying to be a woman" and praised FitzPatrick for her "remarkable wisdom and clarity." In Daimons, a pregnant young woman returns to the small Irish island of her birth and watches as her son grows up communing with the spirits of the remote place, even as developers eye its tourist appeal. In Booklist, Patricia Monaghan liked the "unforgettably peculiar" depiction of the island and concluded that, with its eccentric but recognizable characters, the book could be "Ireland's best comic novel in years."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, September 1, 2003, Patricia Monaghan, review of Daimons, p. 54.

Library Journal, September 15, 2003, Debbie Bogenschutz, review of Daimons, p. 90.

Publishers Weekly, December 14, 1992, review of Fables of the Irish Intelligentsia, p. 52; January 9, 1995, review of The Loves of Faustyna, p. 59.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, spring, 1993, Eamonn Wall, review of Fables of the Irish Intelligentsia, p. 269.

Times Literary Supplement, January 23, 2004, Lucy McDiarmid, "On the Atlantic Fringe."