Czesław Miłosz

Czesław Miłosz, born on 30 June 1911 in Šeteniai in the then Russian Empire and dead in Kraków on 14 August 2004, was a Polish-American poet, prose writer, translator and diplomat. He survived the German occupation of Warsaw, served the postwar Polish government as a cultural attaché, and then defected, finally settling in the United States as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His poetry, written mainly in Polish, deals with morality, politics, history and faith, and his prose book The Captive Mind, an appraisal of Stalinism, made him a leading voice of the émigré intelligentsia. He also translated Western works for Polish readers and championed Slavic literature in the West. He received the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature.