Czesław Miłosz

In 1992, he re-married Carol Thigpen, a US-born historian and associate dean at Emory University, Atlanta. She died in 2002.

He died on August 14, 2004, at his residence in Krakow, Poland, at the age of 93.

Czeslaw Milosz was born on June 30, 1911, in Szetejnie, Kovno Governorate, Russian Empire (now Lithuania), to civil engineer Alexander Milosz and Weronika nee Kunat.

He spent his early years traveling across Russia with his father, who served in the Czar’s army during World War I.

After returning to Lithuania in 1918, the family settled in the then Polish Lithuanian capital, Wilno (now Vilnius), where his formal schooling commenced.

He completed his secondary schooling from Sigismund Augustus Gymnasium in 1929 and graduated from Stefan Batory University with a law degree in 1931.

He received a Masters degree in law from Stefan Batory University in 1934 after which he went to Paris on a one-year fellowship sponsored by the National Cultural Fund.

After earning his law degree, he traveled to Paris in 1931 where he met his distant cousin Oscar Milosz, a Lithuanian French-language poet, who became his inspiration for poetry.

In 1931, he established the Polish avant-garde poetic group ‘Zagary’, along with other poets, namely, Aleksander Rymkiewicz, Jozef Maslinski, Jerzy Zagorski, Teodor Bujnicki, and Jerzy Putrament.

He released his first book of poems titled ‘Poemat o czasie zastyglym’ (Poem of the Frozen Time) in 1934.

In 1936, he started working as a literary commentator at Radio Wilno, but was dismissed a year later for his leftist views. He published his second poetry collection ‘Trzy zimy’ (Three Winters), which was well-received by literary critics.

He moved to Warsaw in 1937 where he took up a job with Polish Radio and spent the entire World War II writing for various underground presses and working as a janitor at the University Library.

He received the Prix Litteraire Europeen (European Literary Prize) for his novel ‘The Seizure of Power’ from the Swiss Book Guild, in 1953.

In 1971, he won an award from the Polish P.E.N. Club, Warsaw, for his poetry translations.

He won a Guggenheim Fellowship for poetry and received an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from the University of Michigan, in 1977.

In 1978, he was bestowed with the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and received the Berkeley Citation (equivalent to honorary PhD) from the University of California, Berkeley.

He was honored with the prestigious Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980.