Rok Miłosza

Born June 30th 1911 in Szetejnie, Lithuania. A poet, prose writer, essayist, and translator. He won the Nobel Prize in 1980, and many other prestigious literary awards throughout his life, and has been translated into forty-two languages. He received honorary doctorates from universities in the USA and in Poland, and was made an honorary citizen of Lithuania and the City of Krakow.

He spent his school days and university youth in Wilno [Vilnius], where he also made his debut as a poet, and lived out the German occupation in Warsaw. After the war he worked in the diplomatic service of the People’s Republic in the USA and in France until 1951, when he appealed for political asylum in Paris.

In 1960 he left for California, where he spent twenty years as a professor of Slavic languages and literature, lecturing...

In gratitude for all the gifts

For quite a while now, those who knew Czeslaw Milosz couldn't help wondering what it was going to be like when he was gone. In the meantime, he more than held his own, writing away for all he was worth in Kraków, in his early 90s, in a flat where I'd had the privilege of visiting him twice. On the first occasion he was confined to his bed, too unwell to attend a conference arranged in his honour, and on the second he was ensconced in his living room, face to face with a life-size bronze head and torso of his second wife, Carol. His junior by some 30 years, she had died from a quick and cruel cancer in 2002, and as he sat on one side of the room facing the bronze on the other, the old poet seemed to be viewing it and...

Czeslaw Milosz was born 30 June 1911 in Szetejnie (presently Šeteniai, Lithuania). This year marks the hundredth anniversary of his birth, the day before Poland will first adopt the presidency of the European Union – on 1 July 2011. Could we even imagine a more symbolic correspondence of dates – and a more perfect patron for this event than the author of Native Europe?

The most important event of the Milosz Year is the Literary Festival, which will be taking place in Krakow from 9-15 May. The second edition of the festival is entitled “Native Europe” [the English translation of this book appears under the title Native Realm – trans.], and it will host 130 poets, writers, translators, and scholars from Europe and beyond – from Bielorus, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Romania, Ireland, England, Italy, Sweden, the Czech Republic and Turkey, as well as from China, India, Lebanon, South Africa ...