Jerzy Jarniewicz graduated in English (1982) and Philosophy (1984), University of Łódź. His doctoral thesis “The Uses of the Commonplace in Contemporary British Poetry: Philip Larkin, Douglas Dunn, Craig Raine” was completed and defended in 1990, winning the Polish Academy of Sciences Award. In 2003 he was granted a postdoctoral degree (Habilitation) for his monographic study “The Bottomless Centre. The Uses of History in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney”, and three years later became Associate Professor of the University of Łódź.

In 1984-85 he studied in Worcester College, University of Oxford, and in 1994 received the British Council postgraduate scholarship in New College, Oxford. In 1999 he was awarded a grant from the US Information Agency to participate in The Iowa International Writers’ Program. In February of 2002 he was a respondent for Seamus Heaney’s Tanner Lectures at the University of Cambridge. In 2006 he worked as writer-in-residence at Farmleigh, Dublin. He has been invited to visit and give lectures at various universities in Poland and abroad, including York, Preston, Sheffield, Oxford, Cambridge, London, Belfast, Coleraine, Giessen, Magdeburg, Stockholm, Prague and Iowa City.

He has published nine critical books on contemporary literature and over 500 articles and reviews in Polish and international learned journals and literary magazines. He has translated over 20 books, including the novels by James Joyce, Philip Roth, John Banville, and Edmund White, as well as the poetry by Derek Walcott, Craig Raine, Christopher Reid, and Simon Armitage. He is the author of eleven volumes of poetry and writes regularly for two national papers “Gazeta Wyborcza”, and “Tygodnik Powszechny”. He is editor of “Literatura na Swiecie” and “Tygiel Kultury” and member of editorial boards of three learned journals “Text Matters” (Łódź), “Przekładaniec” (Cracow) and “Studies in Literature in English” (Frankfurt).