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Dorota Maslowska born 1983 in the Polish village of Wejherowo near Gdansk, entered the public eye at age of 19 with the debut of her novel Snow White and Russian Red, which depicts an urban periphery of cynical Polish teenagers from the housing projects searching for meaning and identity, and she wrote it in their own vernacular. A striking example of postmodernism meeting post-Communism, this debut book won instant acclaim and notoriety, winning the prestigious 2003 Polityka Passport in literature for "her personal take on Polish reality and creative use of common language." It was almost immediately translated into several languages, including French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Russian, English, Hungarian and Czech, and adapted for the screen by Xawery Zulawski in 2009. Maslowska' second novel, The Queen's Peacock (2005), won Poland's highest literary award, the Nike Prize, a controversial choice over seven other finalists, including Nobel Laureate Wislawa Szymborska. The title in Polish, Paw Krolowej, is a play on words that also translates as The Queen's Puke. Described as a prose-poem as well as a rap song, it scathingly satirizes media-makers and pop stars, as well as the author's own success. Theatrical adaptations of both books have been performed widely in Poland. In 2006 Maslowska's debut play, A Couple of Poor, Polish-Speaking Romanians, was commissioned and staged by the TR Warszawa theater, and it has since been staged in London, Berlin, Prague, Moscow and Chicago. A New York staging is planned for the Abrons Arts Center at the Henry Street Settlement in February 2011. A second play, No Matter How Hard We Tried, was commissioned by TR Warszawa and Berlin's Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, and premiered in Berlin at the Internationales Autorenfestival in March 2009, and has been performed in Poland and Stockholm, bringing Maslowska the prize for best playwright at the 9th All-Poland Festival of Contemporary Dramaturgy in Zabrze and the Grand Prix at the theatrical Divine Comedy in Krakow in 2009. In the same year Maslowska received a DAAD Artists Program Fellowship in Berlin. She was a guest in the 2007 PEN World Voices Festival in New York and her remembrance of the time of Communism, "Faraway, So Gross," appears in the Words without Borders anthology The Wall in My Head (2009).