Dialog

Dialog is a monthly journal publishing contemporary dramas, texts for the theatre, both Polish and foreign, as well as essays, columns, and interviews on culture. Since its inception in 1956 it has printed nearly 3,000 issues, becoming the basic source of knowledge about modern dramaturgy. Co-founder and editor-in-chief (1972–89) Konstanty Puzyna had a massive impact on its shape. It is partly thanks to him that Dialog attempted to such an expansive look at theatre and literature for the stage, often including social contexts. These traditions were developed by Małgorzata Szpakowska, head of the essay department in 1972–99, Jacek Sieradzki, editor-in-chief in 1991–2023, and Joanna Krakowska, who ran the essay department in 1999–2025. Since March 2024, the journal’s editor-in-chief has been Piotr Olkusz.

The magazine’s basic task has been to publish dramas. For seventy years, each issue of the monthly magazine has featured at least one Polish play or script. It also prints carefully chosen translations of the most interesting contemporary foreign-language plays. Altogether there have been nearly 2,000 dramatic works, which is, it seems, an unprecedented tally among the world’s theatre periodicals. The plays in Dialog are accompanied by essays, interviews, columns, detailed presentations of playwrights and information on the contemporary theatre scene.

The journal has evolved in its long history. First it played an informal role as advocate for the playwright, and, more broadly speaking, literature, in the process of melding many fields of art that go to make a theatre production. In the 1970s, it was a mouthpiece for theatre born of counterculture dieals, contesting traditional institutions, diminishing the role of the drama, preferring works ‘written on stage’, and seeking direct ties with everyday life. Today Dialog is a magazine that presents the most diverse playwrights, putting their creative diversity front and centre, but also often treating the drama in these texts as a pretext for various intellectual excursions – historical, anthropological, aesthetic, philosophical and journalistic.

The Book Institute has been the publisher of this magazine since 2010.