Czeslaw Milosz was born in Szetejnie, Lithuania in 1911. He is the author of nine English-language poetry collections, including Selected Poems (1973); The Collected Poems, 1931-1987 (1988); and New and Collected Poems, 1931-2001 (2001). Better known for his prose, Milosz is the author of 10 English-language works, including The History of Polish Literature (1969), The Rising of the Sun (1985), and Beginning with My Streets: Essays and Recollections (1992). He is also known for his English-language novels The Seizure of Power (1955) and The Issa Valley (1981). Milosz’s honors include the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the U. S. National Medal of Arts, and a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. Before coming to the U. S., he worked as a literary programmer for Radio Wilno, and later took a job with Polish Radio in Warsaw. Milosz spent most of World War II in Nazi-occupied Warsaw working for underground presses. After the war, he came to the United States as a diplomat for the Polish communist government, working at the Polish consulate first in New York City, then in Washington D. C. In 1961, Milosz became a professor of Slavic languages and literature at the University of California at Berkeley, where he taught for over 35 years. Czeslaw Milosz died in 2004.
Audio Recordings of Czeslaw Milosz
- As part of Poetry in English at the Library of Congress, Czeslaw Milosz and Paul Muldoon reading their poems on December 5, 1991.
- Czeslaw Milosz reading from his poems in the Montpelier Room, Library of Congress, Apr. 3, 1997