Wikipedia (03 Jun 2013, 10:39)
Czesław Miłosz (30 June 1911 – 14 August 2004) was a Polish poet, prose writer and translator of Lithuanian origin.His World War II-era sequence The World is a collection of 20 "naive" poems. After serving as a cultural attaché for the Republic of Poland (1945–1951), he defected to the West in 1951, and his nonfiction book The Captive Mind (1953) is a classic of anti-Stalinism. From 1961 to 1998 he was a professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. Miłosz later became an American citizen and was awarded the 1978 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature.
The Nobel Prize for Literature
In 1980 Miłosz received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Since his works had been banned in Poland by the communist government, this was the first time that many Poles became aware of him.When the Iron Curtain fell, Miłosz was able to return to Poland, at first to visit and later to live part-time in Kraków. He divided his time between his home in Berkeley and an apartment in Kraków. In 1989, he received the U.S. National Medal of Arts and an honorary doctorate from Harvard University.