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Adam Zagajewski was born in Lvóv in the Ukraine in 1945 and is the author of many books of verse and essays as well as several novels. His debut as a poet came in 1972 with the volume Komunikat.
Zagajewski comes from a Polish family that had lived in Lviv for hundreds of years but were expelled to Gliwice in Poland when the city came under Soviet control. He was a vocal critic of the Polish Communist Party from the mid-1970s, resulting in his books being banned from publication until 1989. Zagajewski left Poland in 1981 and went into exile in Paris via West Berlin and the USA. He returned to Kraków in 2002. He now lives in Kraków and Chicago, where he has been teaching at the university since 2007.
Adam Zagajewski is a member of the Academy of Arts, Berlin, and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. His work has garnered many prizes including the Prix de la Liberté, the Nikolaus Lenau Prize for European Poetry, the Horst Bienek Prize and the Samuel Bogomil Linde Prize as well as the 2004 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. German translations of Zagajewski’s poems and essays have frequently appeared in the journal published by the Academy of Arts, Sinn und Form and English translations have appeared widely.
Publications in English translation:
Tremor (1985)
Canvas (1991)
Mysticism for Beginners (1997)
Without End: New and Selected Poems (2002)
Eternal Enemies: Poems (2008)
Unseen Hand: Poems (2011)