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 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, 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.