Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?

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In Britain, we have an awful lot to thank Poland for Joseph Conrad, fighter pilots during the Battle of Britain, pickled cucumber. Okay, maybe not the pickled cucumber. But in the last couple of decades, Poland has moved from the edge of our consciousness to the center of our lives. Poles are now the largest minority group living in the UK, and they're visible everywhere in our labour force.

Polish is the third most spoken language on these islands, after English and Welsh.

But the one place where Poles lack visibility in our national life is in the literary world.

The influx of immigration from Asia and Africa led to the redefinition of British writing as global writing.

But what are polls in Britain reading and writing? And what should we be reading to find out more?

Well, to explore this question, I have two writers who are, as you might say, at opposite polls.

Eva Hoffman is originally from Krakow, but has worked around the world and won acclaim for her memoir lost in translation.

E.M. Bacalar is the first Polish woman writer to publish a novel in English since the accession of Poland to the EU in 2004.

And that's her much acclaimed novel, Madame Mephisto. Would you please welcome them both here tonight.

Asiard, you've said at the past that polls are Britain's invisible minority,

and that might even be true of someone who the British think of as one of their great writers

and that of course is Joseph Conrad. It seems to me that the Polish element of his personality

has been claimed and overwritten in a sense by his Britishness. Do you think Poland needs to

reclaim him? I remember when I was studying English literature at the university back in Poland in Bratsov.

And we always, when we were taught about Joseph Kondrad, we always thought about him as a British writer, not a Polish writer.

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