Kozak, Magdalena
Entry updated 27 April 2026. Tagged: Author.
(1971- ) Polish author of Fantastika, emergency physician, and career military officer, who served as a parachute-trained paramedic in Afghanistan in the early 2010s. She made her genre debut with the humorous fantasy story "Nuda" ["Boredom"] in the online magazine Fahrenheit (December 2003), a pastiche of fairy tales about a Princess in a tower guarded by an evil dragon. She has since published over two dozen stories, often in Nowa Fantastyka, Science Fiction and Esensja.
Kozak's best-known work is the five-volume Vesper sequence (2006-2025), an Urban Fantasy-cum-Military SF series set in modern-day Poland, whose protagonist, a young counter-intelligence officer, becomes a Vampire. Its first volume, Nocarz ["Nighter"] (2006) was also her book debut. The first four volumes of the series have been published in English, making it one of the relatively few works of Polish Fantastika available to international readers.
Her most clearly science-fictional novel is Fiolet ["Violet"] (2010), a fast-paced Near Future military thriller in which extraterrestrial violet-coloured plants – capable of releasing lethal hydrogen cyanide – begin colonizing Earth (see Xenoforming) as in John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids (1951). A detachment of paratroopers is tasked with destroying the seeds during their most vulnerable period – orbital descent. Hard SF elements are underplayed, but the portrayal of military life and parachuting, informed by Kozak's experiences, are technically credible and kinetically vivid in ways that distinguish Fiolet from more desk-bound comparable treatments.
Łzy diabła ["Devil Tears"] (2015) is a military fantasy, set on a planet whose rugged, desert-like terrain, factional conflicts and foreign interventionist presence are unmistakably modelled on the Afghanistan that Kozak experienced first-hand (see also Imperialism). The novel interweaves two dominant storylines, and is effectively a Planetary Romance with the sf worldbuilding twist of being set on a mostly-medieval planet, some decades after its development was impacted after a mercantile space-faring civilization (Earthlings), discovered that the most interesting commodity to be found there is an addictive narcotic Drug. Like Fiolet, the novel was generally praised for its authentic military dimension, but criticized for weak handling of sf elements (see also Slipstream SF).
Kozak's remaining novels are primarily fantasy: Paskuda & Co. ["Nasty & Co."] (coll 2012) light-heartedly develops the premise of her debut story, while Minas Warsaw (2020) is another humorous Urban Fantasy in which the contemporary capital of Poland is suddenly commandeered by a powerful wizard who establishes his headquarters in the iconic Stalinist skyscraper of the Palace of Culture and Science, arriving astride a dragon. [PKo]
Magdalena Kozak
born Warsaw, Poland: 25 June 1971
works
series
Vesper
- Nocarz ["Nighter"] (Lublin, Poland: Fabryka Słów, 2006) [Vesper: pb/Piotr Cieśliński]
- Nighter (New Zealand, Turangi: Cheeky Kea Printworks, 2017) [trans by Monika Wiklik of the above: Vesper: pb/]
- Renegat ["Renegade"] (Lublin, Poland: Fabryka Słów, 2007) [Vesper: pb/Piotr Cieśliński]
- Renegade (New Zealand, Turangi: Cheeky Kea Printworks, 2017) [trans by Monika Wiklik of the above: Vesper: pb/]
- Nikt ["Nobody"] (Lublin, Poland: Fabryka Słów, 2008) [Vesper: pb/Piotr Cieśliński]
- Nobody (New Zealand, Turangi: Cheeky Kea Printworks, 2018) [trans by Monika Wiklik of the above: Vesper: pb/]
- The Vesper Series Collected Edition: Nighter + Renegade + Nobody (Honolulu: Royal Hawaiian Press, 2017) [omni of the indicated trans titles: Vesper: pb/]
- Nobody (New Zealand, Turangi: Cheeky Kea Printworks, 2018) [trans by Monika Wiklik of the above: Vesper: pb/]
- Młody ["Kid"] (Lublin, Poland: Fabryka Słów, 2017) [Vesper: pb/Piotr Cieśliński]
- Inanite (New Zealand, Turangi: Cheeky Kea Printworks, 2018) [trans by Monika Wiklik of the above: Vesper: pb/]
- Gracz ["Player"] (Ustroń, Poland: WarBook, 2025) [Vesper: pb/]
individual titles
- Fiolet ["Violet"] (Warsaw, Poland: Bellona/Runa, 2010) [pb/Piotr Cieśliński]
- Łzy diabła ["Devil Tears"] (Kraków, Poland: Insignis Media,, 2015) [pb/Ilya Yatskievich]
- Minas Warsaw (Lublin, Poland: Fabryka Słów, 2020) [pb/Alicja Kapustka]
collections and stories
- Paskuda & Co. ["Nasty & Co."] (Lublin, Poland: Fabryka Słów, 2012) [coll: pb/Piotr Cieśliński]
links
previous versions of this entry