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Caryl Strzelecki was born in 1960 in Belgium from a Polish father and a Dutch mother. His first name he received from Caryl Chessman, who died in the gass chamber a few months before Strzelecki was born. Was this an omen? He was a quiet kid, the youngest son of a noisy family, growing up in his mother’s café in Beringen, a small coalminers town filled with coarse Italian, Greek, Spanish and Polish immigrants.

School didn’t appeal much to his solitary character. After a short training in the Eindhoven Graphic School, he tried his luck as a cartoonist. He did some work for local papers and Robbedoes (“Spirou”). Greatly influenced by Robert Crumb and the underground scene in New York, he worked with notorious figures like Jan Bucquoy, …. His first comic strip, “Duistere Tijden” (“Hard Times”), was published in 1985 and didn’t got much attention by the time (by now it’s a collectors item). His work being too dark and controversial for post-war Flanders, he stopped completely with cartoons and went to work in the advertising business.

In 2000 he made a comeback with the cartoon “De koffer” (“The Suitcase”), an adaptation of a Herman Brusselmans story, and caught the attention of the Flemish poet Leander Hanssen. This was the beginning of a deep friendship and a lasting cooperation. Together they wrote a series of four children books, called the “Bajka-quartet” (2004-2007). These books, referring to his Polish roots and illustrated by Strzelecki himself in his peculiar, dark, jagged style, tell the story of a midget people in an imagionary eastern european dictatorship called Podzagoera. It was an immediate succes in Flanders and Holland.

After this, a matured Caryl Strzelecki began to work on his adaptations of Charles Bukowski’s poetry, in what he called “graphic poems”. He created for them an very personal, haunting form. He contacted the writer’s widow, Linda Bukowski, who immediately admired his work and encouraged him to continue. Many of the poems were never published before and find in this form their first contact with the audience.