Polish · 1921–2014
Różewicz fought in the Home Army as a teenager; his older brother Janusz, also a poet, was caught and shot by the Gestapo in 1944. He came out of the war convinced that the poetry that had existed before it was no longer usable, and set about writing verse with no metaphor, no metre, no rhyme and almost no adjectives — flat statements broken into lines, which Polish critics called poetry after the end of poetry and which changed the language permanently. He wrote plays too, including The Card Index, in which the protagonist lies in bed while his life walks through the room. He lived in Wrocław, avoided literary society, refused most honours and gave few interviews. He was nominated for the Nobel repeatedly and won the European Prize for Literature and the Nike, Poland's chief literary award.