Adam Zagajewski

Adam Zagajewski was born in Lvov, Poland, in 1945; as an infant he was relocated with his family to western Poland. He lived in Berlin for a couple of years, moved to France in 1982, and taught at universities in the United States, including the University of Houston and the University of Chicago. Zagajewski wrote in Polish, but many of his books of poetry and essays have been translated into English. His prose collections include Two Cities: On Exile, History and the Imagination (1995) and the 2000 memoir Another Beauty. Zagajewski won the Prix de la Liberté as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Berliner Künstlerprogramm.

Zagajewski was considered one of the “Generation of ’68” or “New Wave” writers in Poland; his early work was protest poetry, though he moved away from that emphasis in his later work. The reviewer Joachim T. Baer noted in World Literature Today that Zagajewski’s themes “are the night, dreams, history and time, infinity and eternity, silence and death.” The titles of his poetry collections suggest some of these concerns: Tremor (1985), Mysticism for Beginners (1997), Without End: New and Selected Poems (2002), and Asymmetry (2018). Zagajewski won many awards, including the 2004 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the 2010 European Poetry Prize, and the 2013 Zhongkun International Poetry Prize.

Writing of Zagajewski’s 1991 collection, Canvas, poet and reviewer Robert Pinsky commented that the poems are “about the presence of the past in ordinary life: history not as chronicle of the dead, or an anima to be illuminated by some doctrine, but as an immense, sometimes subtle force inhering in what people see and feel every day—and in the ways we see and feel.”

Zagajewski died on March 21, 2021, in Krakow, Poland. He was 75.