Olga Drenda

Olga Drenda is a writer, essayist and translator. She graduated in Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. She is the author of Polish Ghostology: Objects and People in the Years of Transition, Things: Ingenuity All Around Us—for which she received a nomination for the Polityka Passport Award and won the Gdynia Literary Award in the Essay category—The Word of Humour, as well as the collaborative books Whose Life Is Our Life? (with Bartłomiej Dobroczyński) and A Book About Love (with Małgorzata Halber).

Her work combines an anthropological perspective with close observation of everyday culture, memory and the material traces of the recent past. She is also interested in music culture, from alternative scenes and the histories of festivals to hauntology and the ways in which music preserves the memory of places, aesthetics and generational experience. Since 2013, she has been running the Facebook project Duchologia (“Ghostology”).

She is a regular contributor to Tygodnik Powszechny. In 2024 and 2025, she served as Creative Director of the Conrad Festival in Kraków. Together with Jacek Paśnik, she hosts an original programme on Polish Radio Czwórka dedicated to culture, memory and changing aesthetics, in which music is a recurring theme.