Czesław Miłosz

Who was Czesław Miłosz?

Czesław Miłosz was a Polish poet, prose writer and translator of Lithuanian origin. His World War II-era sequence The World is a collection of 20 "naive" poems. After serving as a cultural attaché for the Republic of Poland, he defected to the West in 1951, and his nonfiction book The Captive Mind is a classic of anti-Stalinism. From 1961 to 1998 he was a professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. Miłosz later became an American citizen and was awarded the 1978 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature.