Marius Kociejowski

Marius Kociejowski (born 1949) is a Canadian-born poet, essayist and travel writer.

Kociejowski was born in 1949 in Bishop's Mills, Ontario, to a Polish father and an English mother. In 1973, he left Canada and later settled in London.^[1] His first publication, Coast, won the Cheltenham Prize for Literature in 1991.^[2] He works as an antiquarian bookseller specializing in poetry.^[3] His interest in Syria has led him to research and write two books about the country,^[4] and edit a Syrian anthology of travel writing. His book God's Zoo (2014) consists of a series of encounters with creative artists living in London who have become exiles from their cultural and geographical roots.^[5]

Works

Poetry

• Coast (Greville Press, 1991)
• Doctor Honoris Causa (Anvil Press, 1993)
• Music's Bride (Anvil Press, 1999). A Canadian edition of his poems, which collected the above
• So Dance the Lords of Language (Porcupine's Quill in 2003) - a Canadian edition containing the above collections in a single volume.

Prose

• The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool: A Syrian Journey (Sutton, 2004; new edition by Eland in 2016)
• Syria through Writers' Eyes (Eland, 2006) - an anthology edited by Kociejowski
• The Pigeon Wars of Damascus (Biblioasis, 2010) - a sequel to The Street Philosopher
• The Pebble Chance: Feuilletons and Other Prose (2014)
• God’s Zoo: Artists, Exiles, Londoners (2014)
• Zoroaster's Children and Other Travels (2016)

References