2011 – Miłosz Year

A wide range of events is planned including new book publications, academic conferences, panel discussions, and exhibitions not only in Poland but also in Lithuania, France and the United States.

The climax of the celebrations will be the Czesław Miłosz Literary Festival to be held in Kraków in the first half of May.

Miłosz, best known as the author of The Captive Mind (1953) was born in present-day Lithuania, to partly Polish, partly Lithuanian parents and was brought up in the multinational milieu of Vilnius.

He graduated from the University of Vilnius with a degree in law. Before World War Two he worked for Polish Radio for ten years.

After the outbreak of war, he became active in underground circles in Warsaw, where he spent most of the Nazi occupation. Between 1946 and 1951 Miłosz served as a member of the Polish Foreign Service, but despite his initial sympathies for the new regime he eventually broke with the communist authorities and defected to the West. After several years in France, he emigrated to the United States and taught for many years at the University of California, Berkeley.

During the communist period, his works were not officially available in Poland. In 1980, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for voicing “with uncompromising clear-sightedness man’s exposed condition in the world of severe conflicts”.

After the fall of communism, he returned to Poland and spent the last years of his life in Kraków, where he died in 2004, aged ninety three. (mk/pg)