Szept means whisper
A good poem does not shout at a room. It leans in close, says one true thing quietly, and then the person carries it around for years afterwards.
Everything here is written by one pair of hands. And it is me who answers your messages.
Szept is a small poetry studio, which is a generous way of saying it is one poet, a desk, and a great deal of tea.
I was born in Poland and I write in Sheffield, which means I have spent my whole adult life between two languages, and I have come to love what happens in the space between them. Everything I write happens somewhere in there.
My poems rhyme, they are warm, and there is almost always a small joke hiding near the tender part, because that is how real affection sounds when people say it out loud. I write them by hand and by heart, one at a time, and I never give the same poem to two people.
People sometimes ask why the poems rhyme at all, since rhyme is apparently out of fashion. Because rhyme is how a line stays in somebody's head for twenty years, and that is the entire point of what I do.
And because I write in Polish as well as English, I can do something rather rare: write the same beautiful thing twice, once for each side of a family, so that nobody at the table is left translating.
A word that rhymes with kept
Szept is the Polish word for a whisper. English speakers find it easily: it begins with the sound in shoe and rhymes with kept, which felt like a lucky accident for a studio that makes things to be kept. Small enough to fold into a pocket, and important enough to stay in a drawer forever.
For anyone writing about Szept
Szept is a poetry studio founded in 2026 by Paulina Katewicz, a Polish-born poet based in Sheffield. It writes bespoke poems for weddings, anniversaries, births, farewells and ordinary days, in English, in Polish, or in both languages at once, and works with letterpress and stationery studios who print them. Every piece is written by hand, for one person, and never repeated.
Photographs, the studio mark in print quality and sample poems for quotation are available on request. Interviews in English or Polish are welcome.