Jacek Hogobader

Vocation

Polish reporter and journalist fascinated by Russia and the former Soviet Republics. Since 1990 he has worked for Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper. He also used to work as teacher, train loader, scale operator at pigs purchase point, head of a distribution company, a part of underground structure of Solidarity and shopkeeper. He travelled by bike through Central Asia, the Gobi Desert and China, and sailed through Lake Baikal in a canoe. In winter 2007 he made a lonely car journey from Moscow to Vladivostok which was the background of his first book White Fever: A Journey to the Frozen Heart of Siberia. In 2001 he made a solitary hitchhike across Russia – from Magadan to Yakutsk. Reports describing encountered people's everyday lives were published in Gazeta Wyborcza during the journey and later gathered and released in the book Kolyma Diaries: A Journey into Russia's Haunted Hinterland. He is a two-time laureate of Polish prize for the best journalists - Grand Press (in 1999 and 2003). Most of his works are about Russia: "(...) he describes the imperium from prospect of loitering dog, grasps mechanisms of thinking, behaviour, processes and a rat by its tail it addition." Link to Wikipedia biography