Milosz Year inaugurated in US

The Nobel Prize-winning author, who was born in June 1911 in lands that lie in current-day Lithuania, spent close to forty years in exile in America, where he worked as a professor of Slavic Languages and Literature at Berkeley.

The New York institute said that it was 'honoured' to be leading the celebrations in the U.S., adding that the writer 'lived a full life as an independent thinker and as an inspiration to others struggling against the prevailing forces in their own contexts.'

Milosz, a former cultural attache of the Warsaw government in Paris, defected to the West in 1951. His study of the plight of intellectuals in Communist Europe, The Captive Mind, (1953), became a cause celebre.

He moved from France to the States in 1960, where he wrote a seminal academic work, The History of Polish Literature (1969) whilst serving as a professor at Berkeley. He continued to write poems, one his greatest passions since adolescence.

Milosz returned to Poland in the 1990s, following the collapse of the Iron Curtain, and was laid to rest in Krakow with great honours in 2004.

Tributes to the writer begin in New York today with readings and reflections from poet Adam Zagajewski, as well as Berkeley colleague Robert Hass and Milosz's biographer Clare Cavanagh. (nh)

Source: IAR