Czeslaw Milosz
Czesław Miłosz ([ˈt ʂɛswafˈmiwɔʂ] ( listen); 30 June 1911 – 14 August 2004) was a Polish poet, prose writer, translator and diplomat of Lithuanian origin. His World War II-era sequence, The World, is a collection of twenty naive poems. Following the war, he served as Polish cultural attaché in Paris and Washington, D.C., then in 1951 defected to the West. His nonfiction book, The Captive Mind (1953), became a classic of anti-Stalinism. From 1961 to 1998 he was a professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. He became a U.S. citizen in 1970. In 1978 he was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and in 1980 the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1999 he was named a Puterbaugh Fellow. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, he divided his time between Berkeley, California, and Kraków, Poland.