The success of The Witcher by Andrzej Sapkowski—impressive print runs, dozens of translations, the world-famous video games, a comic book series, and now also a beloved Netflix show—might blind us to an important fact: at the very source of it all, there is not some efficient marketing campaign, a cleverly-engineered fad, or massive promotional funding, but brilliant writing and the vision of just one man.

The Ascent

The success of the most popular Polish fantasy series did not happen overnight. And the very fact that this success ever happened could be considered a miracle.

Sapkowski’s first short story, titled simply “The Witcher”, was published in 1986 in Fantastyka magazine, the only national fantasy and science-fiction magazine in Poland of the late-communist era. The author, back then unknown to anyone, submitted his short story to a recurring literary competition. The story took home the third-place award, which was a big success considering that the editorial team consisted of hard-core sci-fi fans who, by default, approached fantasy with some distrust. The next short story saw daylight two years later, and it took another year before the third one came out. No wonder—Sapkowski worked as a sales representative in the fur trade and had other things on his plate, and on top of that, Fantastyka’s policy did not allow the publishing of one author too often. Then the year 1989 happened, bringing along a great political shift and spontaneous capitalism in Poland, which in turn caused a crop of new publishing houses to pop up one after another. Street stalls were groaning under the weight of popular and genre fiction that had never been available in Poland before, either because of censorship or financial limitations. A major part of that literary flood was the fantasy genre. The only trouble