Cirrus@Austlit

Leszek Szymanski worked as a journalist and writer, and won a short story competition in Poland at an early age. He continued to win prizes for his writing as he grew older, although publication of his stories was stopped by censorship and his writing declared 'black literature'.

At 23 Szymanski became chief editor of an independent literary magazine in Poland. After a visit to India, he lived in Sydney, until literary disappointments made him emigrate to London and thence to California in the 1970s, where he became editor of a Polish newspaper in Los Angeles.

In 1973 he contributed text (with Tadeusz Bielecki) to the pictorial history book Warsaw Aflame: The 1939-1945 Years [1974], and he has also written a completed but unpublished novel, 'Drunken Maniana', set in the Hellenic world of 184-140 BC.