Czesław Miłosz

Czesław Miłosz was born in Poland on 30 June 1911 and spent the war years surviving the German occupation of Warsaw. After 1945 he became a cultural attaché for Poland's new communist government, but when the authorities began threatening his safety, he defected to France and then settled in the United States, teaching at Berkeley. His wartime poetry and The Captive Mind, a prose dissection of Stalinism, established him as a major émigré voice. The Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980, citing a writer who "voices man's exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts". He spent decades translating Western literature into Polish and pressing the West to pay attention to Slavic writers, while his own work circled questions of faith, morality, and history. He died in Kraków on 14 August 2004 and was buried at Skałka, a church reserved for Poland's most honored dead.