Topos

Topos is a Polish literary bimonthly founded in 1993 by poet Krzysztof Kuczkowski, who ran it for over thirty years. Since 2025, the editor-in-chief has been poet and essayist Tadeusz Dąbrowski, who was previously (since 2002) a member of the editorial team. Over 200 issues of Topos have been released to this day, and 250 books have been published in the Topos Library series.

Topos’s ambition has been to create a community of poets and writers focusing their art around values that grew from Mediterranean civilisation, defined by the Platonic triad: Beauty, Goodness and Truth. Since issue 5/2025, this Tri-City bimonthly has come out in a new format.

Topos gave rise to several literary ‘institutions’: the Polish Rainer Maria Rilke Poetry Competition (since 1997), the Poetry Festival in Sopot (since 2001), a series of poetry posters designed by Tadeusz Dąbrowski and attached to the journal  (from 2001 to 2016 around sixty posters were produced, with a wide panorama of Polish contemporary poetry, by such figures as: Marian Grześczak, Julian Kornhauser, Ryszard Krynicki, Adam Zagajewski, Ewa Lipska, Janusz Szuber, Krzysztof Karasek, Bohdan Zadura, Andrzej Sosnowski, Jacek Gutorow and Karol Maliszewski, The Topos Library (over 250 volumes of poems and essay collections since 2003), Maestro – the Honorary Award of the Topos Community (since 2015).

The publisher of the magazine has been the Book Institute since 2022.