Rita Gombrowicz was born Rita Labrosse in Montréal in 1935. She is the widow of the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz, whom she met at the Royaumont Abbey cultural center in France in 1964, and has worked as his literary executor since his death in 1969. She speaks English and French, and holds a doctorate in French literature from the Sorbonne, where she wrote on Colette. Read More She is the author of two major biographical works devoted to the writer: Gombrowicz en Argentine and Gombrowicz en Europe, both of which have been translated and published in several languages, as well as of an authoritative Web site on the playwright, www.gombrowicz.net. For forty years, she has been both the public and literary representative of Gombrowicz's work, most notably during the years of censorship of his writings in communist Poland, which included surveillance and harassment of her in Paris by Polish communist security forces in the 1970s and 1980s. She has served as the honorary patron of the International Gombrowicz Festivals held in Poland since 1993, and is an Advisory Board Member for Pig Iron Theatre Company in Philadelphia.