Marek Strzala is author and journalist based in Krakow, Poland. To date he has published numerous articles and essays as well as two books and three guidebooks to Krakow. Marek Strzala started a writing career early, penning a number of plays at high school and university that won him a handful of prizes at professional drama competitions. As a Jagiellonian University sophomore he began contributing articles to Poland’s top weeklies and as a senior he landed a full-time editorial job in 1981. In 1982 under the martial regime the communist authorities rightly recognized him as a known activist of the Solidarity movement and officially banned him from working in the mass media. The same year he earned his Master of Arts in Political Science and Journalism from the Jagiellonian University. Through the rest of the 1980s Marek Strzala contributed to many underground Solidarity periodicals under several pen names and to a number of prestigious Catholic weeklies and monthlies under his own name. At the same time he published English articles in the UK and in the USA. In 1989 he briefly joined The Times as a visiting foreign journalist at its London headquarters. In 1990 he crisscrossed the States: from Ohio to Alabama and from California to New York. For six months in 1991 he worked as news director for the Polish Television in Krakow (see the picture above}. In December 1991 Marek Strzala launched Cracoviana magazine and run it for the ensuing decade as the publisher-editor. In 2001 he started Krakow Info website and he has operated it ever since.