Polish · 1945–2021
Zagajewski was born in Lwów four months before the Soviets expelled its Polish population; his family was put on a train to Silesia and he grew up in Gliwice, in a German city emptied of Germans, among people who talked about a home he could not remember. He studied philosophy in Kraków, belonged to the New Wave generation of poets who wrote against the official language of the 1970s, signed the Letter of 59 protesting constitutional changes, and was banned from publication. He left for Paris in 1982, taught at Houston and Chicago, and returned to Kraków in 2002. His poem Try to Praise the Mutilated World was printed on the back page of the New Yorker after 11 September 2001 and became, briefly, the most read poem in America — an accident he treated with visible unease, since he had written it about Poland. He won the Neustadt Prize in 2004 and the Princess of Asturias Award in 2017.