Czeslaw Milosz

Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) was a prominent Polish writer, philologist, and intellectual of the twentieth century, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980. He was born and spent his early years in Lithuania. During the interwar period, he emerged as a young, talented poet and published his first works in Vilnius, which was then a Polish cultural center, where he studied law and philology. During the Nazi occupation, he participated in the country's clandestine intellectual life. After liberation, he joined the diplomatic corps of the People's Republic and served in the USA and France. In 1951, he resigned and settled in Paris as a scholar and writer, opposing the pro-Soviet regime. From 1960 to 1993, he lived in the USA and became a leading expert in Polish and Slavic literature at American universities. In 1980, the year of the popular resurgence of "Solidarity" in Poland, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his work, previously banned in Poland, was publicly recognized. In 1993, he returned to Poland and spent his last decade in Krakow, remaining active in the fields of literature and culture.