WORKSHOPS
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About the Facilitator
Jacek Hugo-Bader is one of the most esteemed Polish reporters, specializing in the countries of the former Communist Bloc. Since 1990 he has been associated with "Gazeta Wyborcza" as a reporter. Twice a winner of the Grand Press award, as a writer best known of books such as "Shaman's Disease", "White Fever", "Kolyma Diaries".
As a reporter, he spent almost four years in Russia and former Soviet Union republics. Teacher by trade, a traveler by passion. He’s been all over Central Asia, the Gobi desert, China, Tibet and the Pamir mountains on bicicle, and crossed Lake Baikal by canoe. In the winter of 2007 he had traveled alone for months by car from Moscow to Vladivostok, which he described in the White Fever. In 2011 he hitchhiked from Magadan to Yakutsk. The diary of the journey, in the form of articles and recordings, was being published in Gazeta Wyborcza, after which it found its way along with new reports into the book The Kolyma Diaries, published in December of that same year.
He is also the author of the books Long Film About Love. Return to Broad Peak and In Paradise Valley Among the Weeds, nominated for the Nike Literary Award, and co-author of the documentaries "Jacek Hugo-Bader. Correspondent from Polsha," which tells the story of the Ukrainian Donbass, and Trace of the Mezuzah about the Belarusian Jews. He has won the Grand Press award twice and major awards from the Association of Polish Journalists. His book Skucha was nominated for the "Newsweek" Teresa Torańska Award and the Nike Literary Award, and the "Book Literary Magazine" published by the National Library named it the best reportage book of 2016. Two years later, Jacek Hugo-Bader published Audit, and in 2020 Shaman Sickness was published. April 2022 saw the release of his new book, Guardians of Freedom.
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BOOK:
"SHAMAN'S DISEASE"
Publisher: HBM Hugo-Bader Media (2021)
Jacek Hugo-Bader, a reporter, describes the most extraordinary journey in his life, for which he prepared for 13 years. And to make it unique to the very end, he founded his own publishing house to publish the book. He did everything himself - apart from the blessing of the shaman Altana, the shamans Ondar, Kulan and Andrei Pavlov.
In the book, he talks about shamanism, which is part of the culture of the local indigenous people, and about the incredible people he had the pleasure of meeting along the way. It also presents amazing and hard to believe stories. From the book we learn, among others: what is the shamanic disease that chooses a person and torments him until he accepts it.
Excerpt from the book:
"This is not an ordinary body basking in steam and hot water, but a shamanic torture in a sweat lodge, bringing oneself to ecstasy through physical torment, a fire and water ritual in which the screams and howls of women mix with the throaty singing of shamans. It is terrifying, devilish a sound of an inhumanly low frequency that sends shivers down your spine. They call it croaking, that is, rattling, hoarse or wheezing singing, and in our case - throat singing. Although your imagination tells you that it is a melody that is torn from someone's stomach, the song of a dying person torture.
And every now and then one of the women runs out of the hut and, completely naked, staggers like a madwoman with her head hanging loose across the courtyard, falls to the ground, shouts something incomprehensible, and then falls silent, rubs her wet face, breasts and belly with her hands dirty from the ground, and returns to the house. hot as hell cabin.
Another magical night. Full of madness, screaming, crying and wailing."
(excerpt from the book Shaman's Disease, Jacek Hugo-Bader)
