Czesław Miłosz

Czesław Miłosz ( MEE-losh, US also -⁠lawsh, -⁠wosh, -⁠wawsh, Polish: [ˈt͡ʂɛswaf ˈmiwɔʂ] ; 30 June 1911 – 14 August 2004) was a Polish-American poet, prose writer, translator, and diplomat. Regarded as one of the great poets of the 20th century, he won the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature. In its citation, the Swedish Academy called Miłosz a writer who "voices man's exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts".

Miłosz survived the German occupation of Warsaw during World War II and, after the war, became a cultural attaché for the Polish government. When communist authorities threatened his safety, he defected to France and ultimately chose exile in the United States, where he became a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His poetry (particularly about his wartime experiences) and his appraisal of Stalinism in a prose book, The Captive Mind, brought him renown as a leading émigré artist and intellectual.

Throughout his life and work, Miłosz tackled questions of morality, politics, history, and faith. The latter, in particular, played a role in his work as he explored his Catholicism and personal experience. As a translator, he introduced Western works to a Polish audience, and as a scholar and editor, he championed a greater awareness of Slavic literature in the West. His poetry was primarily written in Polish; some of his prose was written in English.

Miłosz died in Kraków, Poland, in 2004. He is interred in Skałka, a church known in Poland as a place of honor for distinguished Poles.

Notable works: The Captive Mind, Campo di Fiori, Piosenka o końcu świata, A Treatise on Poetry, The Issa Valley, history of Polish literature, The Seizure of Power, Ocalenie Awards: Nobel Prize in Literature, Righteous Among the Nations, Guggenheim Fellowship, Order of the White Eagle (Third Polish Republic), National Medal of Arts, Neustadt International Prize for Literature, Honorary doctor of the University of Bologna, honorary doctor of the Jagiellonian University of Krakow, Honorary doctor of the University of Oxford, Nike Award Education: Vilnius University

Source: Wikipedia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czes%C5%82aw_Mi%C5%82osz