Julian Kornhauser was born in Gliwice in 1946 and is one of the most acclaimed figures of Polish poetry writing today, while also being a critic, translator and professor of South-Slavic literatures at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. A major figure of the New Wave movement of the 1970s, he has published eight books since the mid-1990s, including three collections of poetry, Kamyk i cień (1996), Było minęło (2001), and Origami (2007), in which a shift from collective preoccupations to a more personal and iconographic tone can be seen.