Czeslaw Milosz
Polish poet
Died when: 93 years 45 days (1117 months)Star Sign: Cancer
Czeslaw Milosz (/'mi?l??/, also US: /-l???, 'mi?w??, -w???/, Polish: ['t??swaf 'miw??]; 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 Milosz a writer who "voices man's exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts".
Milosz survived the German occupation of Warsaw during World War II and became a cultural attaché for the Polish government during the postwar period.
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 experience—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, Milosz tackled questions of morality, politics, history, and faith.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.
Faith played a role in his work as he explored his Catholicism and personal experience.He wrote in Polish and English.
Milosz died in Kraków, Poland, in 2004.He is interred in Skalka, a church known in Poland as a place of honor for distinguished Poles.
