Witold Szabłowski is a Polish reporter and writer whose books have been translated into more than 30 languages and published on five continents.
Witold Szabłowski is a Polish reporter and writer whose books have been translated into more than 30 languages and published on five continents.
Witold Szabłowski is a Polish reporter and writer whose books have been translated into more than 30 languages and published on five continents. He gained international recognition with How to Feed a Dictator, a project he spent eight years researching by traveling the world to track down the personal chefs of some of the most notorious dictators of the 20th and 21st centuries - including Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro, Pol Pot, and Vladimir Putin. In the book, Szabłowski presents the history of tyrants from an entirely new perspective: through food, everyday rituals, and the relationships with those who worked closest to power. The documentary film How to Feed a Dictator, based on the book, was co-written and co-produced by Szabłowski. It premiered at the prestigious Tribeca Festival in New York - one of the world’s leading film festivals, founded by Robert De Niro.
Szabłowski began his career in journalism at TVN24 and later spent many years at Gazeta Wyborcza and its acclaimed magazine Duży Format, where he became one of the youngest reporters in the publication’s history. He is known for his unconventional reporting methods: he has smuggled a car across the Polish-Ukrainian border, hosted an alcohol-free wedding as an MC, hitchhiked with Cubans fearing for Fidel Castro’s life, and interviewed Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi moments after her release from house arrest - becoming only the second journalist in the world to do so.
His work often explores themes of historical memory, dictatorships, social transformation, and everyday life in post-communist and authoritarian societies. In addition to How to Feed a Dictator, his other widely acclaimed books include Dancing Bears, The Assassin from the Apricot City, and What’s Cooking in the Kremlin. To write Stories from Volhynia, he spent four years tirelessly traveling the region in search of the last surviving witnesses of the 1943 massacres. The book earned him the Newsweek Award.
His reportage has received numerous awards in Poland and abroad, including the European Parliament Journalism Prize, the Beata Pawlak Award, and distinctions from Amnesty International.
Szabłowski is known for his distinctive literary style - he often reaches people standing on the margins of "Great History" and portrays political realities through the perspective of ordinary individuals. Thanks to this approach, he is now regarded as one of the most recognizable contemporary Polish non-fiction writers.