Janus Pannonius Grand Prize-winning Polish poet Adam Zagajewski passed away

Adam Zagajewski was born in Lviv in 1945, spent his childhood in Gliwice, Silesia, and studied psychology and philosophy at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow.

His first book of poetry was published in 1968. Together with his colleague Julian Kornhauser (father-in-law of current Polish President Andrzej Duda), he developed the poetic programme of the Polish New Wave, rejecting the highly metaphorical poetics of post-WWII Polish literature, and advocating the representation and culturalisation of everyday reality.

As an intellectual associated with the left-wing democratic opposition, he was placed on the banned authors list in 1975, edited the independent newspaper Zapis from 1976, and emigrated to Paris in 1982, where he became a contributor to the legendary Polish literary magazines Kultura and Zeszyty Literackie.

In his works during his emigration, he rejected the roles of a martyr and a prophet.

He returned to Krakow in 2002, and in the volumes published since then he has drawn an intellectual map of the Central European artist, writing about the places of his childhood and his ideological influences. He also tried to identify the threats that civilisation poses to spiritual life. His poems, with their disciplined style and unadorned verse, are permeated by questions of the intertwining of time, history and infinity.

Since 1988, he has taught creative writing at the University of Houston and lectured at the University of Chicago. In the United States, the translation of the poem written before September 11, 2001, but published in The New Yorker only after the terrorist attacks, titled “Try to Prise the Mutilated World,” became the most well-known.

In recent years, he has been mentioned among the poets nominated for the Nobel Prize, and has won several prizes in Poland and abroad.