Czesław Miłosz was a Polish-American poet, prose writer, translator, and diplomat. Regarded as one of the great poets of the 20th century, he won the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature. In its citation, the Swedish Academy called Miłosz a writer who "voices man's exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts".
Maria Wisława Anna Szymborska was a Polish poet, essayist, translator, and recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in Prowent, she resided in Kraków until the end of her life. In Poland, Szymborska's books have reached sales rivaling prominent prose authors', though she wrote in a poem, "Some Like Poetry", that "perhaps" two in a thousand people like poetry.
Polish literature is the literary tradition of Poland. Most Polish literature has been written in the Polish language, though other languages used in Poland over the centuries have also contributed to Polish literary traditions, including Latin, Yiddish, Lithuanian, Russian, German and Esperanto. According to Czesław Miłosz, for centuries Polish literature focused more on drama and poetic self-expression than on fiction. The reasons were manifold but mostly rested on the historical circumstances of the nation. Polish writers typically have had a more profound range of choices to motivate them to write, including past cataclysms of extraordinary violence that swept Poland, but also, Poland's collective incongruities demanding an adequate reaction from the writing communities of any given period.
Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky was a Russian and American poet and essayist.
Jan Kochanowski was a Polish Renaissance poet who wrote in Latin and Polish and established poetic patterns that would become integral to Polish literary language. He is commonly regarded as the greatest Polish poet before Adam Mickiewicz and the most important Slavic poet before the 19th century.
Robert L. Hass is an American poet. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. He won the 2007 National Book Award and shared the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for the collection Time and Materials: Poems 1997–2005. In 2014 he was awarded the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets.
Tadeusz Konwicki was a Polish writer and film director, as well as a member of the Polish Language Council.
Tomas Venclova is a Lithuanian poet, prose writer, scholar, philologist and translator of literature. He is one of the five founding members of the Lithuanian Helsinki Group. In 1977, following his dissident activities, he was forced to emigrate and was deprived of his Soviet citizenship. Since 1980, he has taught Russian and Polish literature at Yale University. Considered a major figure in world literature, he has received many awards, including the Prize of Two Nations, and The Person of Tolerance of the Year Award from the Sugihara Foundation, among other honors.
Adam Zagajewski was a Polish poet, novelist, translator, and essayist. He was awarded the 2004 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award, the 2017 Princess of Asturias Award for Literature and the 2018 Golden Wreath of Poetry at the Struga Poetry Evenings. He was considered a leading poet of the Generation of '68, or Polish New Wave, and one of Poland's most prominent contemporary poets.
Louis Michael Iribarne was a Canadian translator of Polish into English. He translated works by Witold Gombrowicz, Stanisław Lem, Czesław Miłosz, Bruno Schulz and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. He also taught Polish and Russian literature at the University of Toronto, where he retired in 1998.
Odra is a Polish monthly art and culture magazine which has the reputation of an opinion-maker. The magazine provides news and commentaries on art and culture in Poland and abroad.
The Laments is a series of nineteen threnodies (elegies) written in Polish by Jan Kochanowski and published in 1580. They are a high point of Polish Renaissance literature, and one of Kochanowski's signal achievements.
Polish poetry has a centuries-old history, similar to the Polish literature.
Bill Johnston is a prolific Polish language literary translator and professor of comparative literature at Indiana University. His work has helped to expose English-speaking readers to classic and contemporary Polish poetry and fiction. In 2008 he received the Found in Translation Award for his translation of new poems by Tadeusz Różewicz; this book was also a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Poetry Award.
Wydawnictwo Literackie is a Kraków-based Polish publishing house, which has been referred to as one of Poland's "most respected".
Hatif Janabi is an Iraqi poet, translator and author. Born near Babylon in 1952, he studied Arabic language and literature at Baghdad University. He moved to Warsaw, Poland in 1976 for higher studies, eventually obtaining a master's degree in Polish language and literature and a PhD in drama, both from Warsaw University. He has lived in Poland ever since and now teaches Arabic language and literature at Warsaw University. He has also taught at the University of Tizi Ouzou and Indiana University.
The Found in Translation Award is an annual award for the best translation of Polish literature into English. The award is given to the translator(s) who also receive a cash prize of PLN 16,000.
Christophe Jezewski, in Polish Krzysztof Andrzej Jeżewski is a poet, musicologist, essayist and translator of Polish descent who has been living in France since 1970.
A list of the published work by or about American poet Robert Pinsky.
