Polish fantasy writer, economist by education. Creator of the Witcher character. The most translated Polish fantasy author after Lem.
In 2012, Minister of Culture and National Heritage Bogdan Zdrojewski awarded him the Gloria Artis silver medal. He is a graduate of the University of Lodz and an economist by profession who worked in foreign trade for many years.
As a fantasy author, he debuted in 1986 with the short story The Witcher, which began a series of stories about the white-haired monster conqueror Geralt of Rivia. Sapkowski's saga is considered by critics to be a literary phenomenon of the 1990s; each of its volumes tops the bestseller lists.
In 2002, the first volume of the Hussite trilogy, Tower of Fools, was published, followed by the later volumes Wariors of God and Light Perpetual. In addition to the Witcher cycle and the Hussite trilogy, Sapkowski is also the author of the essay micro-novel The World of King Arthur. Maladie and the lexicon of fantasy literature Manuscript Discovered in a Dragon's Cave. Stories outside the series have been collected in the volume titled Something Ends, Something Begins. In 2005, Professor Stanisław Bereś, one of Poland's most eminent literary scholars and critics, interviewed Andrzej Sapkowski for the book Historia i Fantastyka [History and Fantasy]. In 2009 his last book, Viper, has been published.
Andrzej Sapkowski has won many Polish and foreign literary awards, including the Paszport Polityki (Passport of the Politics) award and the Janusz A. Zajdel award five times – for his short stories The Lesser of Two Evils (1990), Sword of Destiny (1992), In a Bomb Crater (1993), and the novels Blood of Elves (1994) and The Tower of Fools (2002). He is the second most awarded author in the history of the award, after Jack Dukai. In 2003, he was nominated for the Nike Literary Award for The Tower of Fools.
In June 2009, he became the first non-English-speaking author to win the David Gemmel Award for the English edition of the first volume of The Witcher saga The Blood of Elves.
His books have been translated into nearly twenty languages: English, German, Russian, Spanish, French, Lithuanian, Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian, Portuguese, Bulgarian, Serbian, Finnish, Italian, Swedish, Dutch, Estonian, Chinese, Hungarian.