Was a cultural attach for Poland (1945-1951).
Was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980.
When he was young, he used to travel between Lithuania, Poland and Paris.
He left Poland for France in 1951 and from there moved to the USA. There he became a teacher at Berkeley.
A Nobel Laureate, he was still writing poems at age 90.
Milosz was a little-known poet when he joined the Slavic Languages and Literature Department at UC Berkeley in 1960. But by the early 1970s, young poets were hitchhiking to Berkeley to hear him speak. With his famously bushy eyebrows and craggy features, Milosz was an unmistakable figure on campus, where he taught for more than 20 years.
Born to a Polish-speaking family in Lithuania, he studied law at the University of Vilnius and published his first book of poems in 1936.
During World War II, Milosz joined the socialist resistance to Nazi-occupied Warsaw and published an anthology of anti-Nazi poetry. He was a witness to the Warsaw uprising of 1944. During the peak of the Cold War, his writings did not reach his native country because of communist censorship.
Had two sons with his first wife: Anthony and John Peter.
He was awarded the American National Medal of the Arts in 1989 by the National Endowment of the Arts in Washington D.C.
The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason. The passionless cannot change history.
Grow your tree of falsehood from a small grain of truth. Do not follow those who lie in contempt of reality. Let your lie be even more logical than the truth itself, so the weary travelers may find repose. .
