CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ

Czesław Miłosz

Czesław Miłosz, was born on June 30, 1911, in Šeteniai, (Lithuania) and died on August 14, 2004, in Kraków, (Poland).

Czesław Miłosz was a Polish-American author, critic, translator, and diplomat who, in 1980, received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Miłosz studied at the University of Wilno (now Vilnius) in Lithuania and moved to Warsaw (Poland) due to the Nazi occupation of the country. In Warsaw, he started to be active in the resistance. In 1945, in the same year of the publication of ‘Ocalenie’, a collection of prewar poems, he joined the Polish democratic service. In 1960 he moved to the United States and became a naturalized citizen ten years later.

Although Miłosz is primarily known as a poet, his most well-known work remains Zniewolony umysł ‘The captive mind’, a collection of essays condemning the accommodation of Polish intellectuals to communism.

Imre Kertész
Imre Kertész was an Hungarian writer (1929-2016).Nobel Prize in Literature (2002). He is known for the semi-autobiographical account of the Holocaust that forms the subject of the trilogy Sorstalanság. Coming from a Jewish middle-class family, in 1944 he was deported to Auschwitz and then transferred to other concentration camps returning, after liberation, to Hungary. Between 1948 and 1951 he collaborated with the magazine Világosság (Clarity) and worked as a factory worker. From 1953 he devoted himself to translating Austrian and German prose.