Zofia Chadzynska (1912–2003)

Zofia Chądzyńska was born in Warsaw, Poland, and attended a Catholic private school and the state gymnasium (high school). She graduated with a master's degree from the Faculty of Economics of the Academy of Political Sciences in Warsaw. From 1930 to 1934, she worked as a clerk in the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Public Education, and then became a tour guide in a foreign travel agency. During World War II, she spent six months imprisoned by the Nazis at Pawiak. After the war, she and her first husband Bohdan Chądzyński managed to get into the American Zone and then traveled to Tangiers, Morocco. When his health worsened, they returned to Poland. In 1949, her husband was given a post as Polish vice-consul in Lyon, France. After this job ended, they decided to go into exile in Argentina. They settled in Buenos Aires, where she ran a laundry and befriended writers Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar and renewed her acquaintance with Witold Gombrowicz. In 1959, her first book, Ślepi bez lasek (The Blind without Sticks) was released nearly simultaneously in Polish and in French as Comme l'ombre qui passé (1960), under the pen name Sophie Bohdan. Her first husband had died in 1951 and in 1960, she returned to live in Warsaw. She wrote her own works and translated and popularized Latin American writers in her homeland. She was a member of the Polish PEN Club and won its award for her translations of Latin American literature in 1993. Her novel Wstęga pawilonu was adapted into a 1986 film for Polish television called Słońce w gałęziach (The Sun in the Branches). She married as her second husband Stanislaw Gajewski, a Polish diplomat, and as her third husband Christopher Ligota, a scientist.