Adam Zagajewski is an award-winning poet, novelist, translator and essayist, who currently works as the Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literature and as a co-editor of Zeszyty Literackie (Literary Review).
Born in Lviv in 1945, he grew up and studied in southern Poland, becoming well-known as one of the leading poets of the generation of ‘68 and a proponent of the Polish New Wave (Nowa Fala). His poems and essays have since been translated into many languages and his work has been acknowledged with numerous prizes, including the Kurt Tucholsky Prize of the City of Stockholm (1985), the Prix de la Liberté from the French branch of PEN (1987), the Neustadt International Prize for Literature (2004), the Heinrich Mann Prize (2015) and the Jean Améry Prize for European essay writing (2016). He was also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010 and 2012 and is a member of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung (The German Academy for Language and Poetry) and the Polska Akademia Umiejętności (Polish Academy of Learning).
Zagajewski is the author of numerous works, including the poetry volumes Tremor (1985), Canvas (1991), Mysticism for Beginners (1997) and Without End: New and Selected Poems (2002) as well as the essay collections Solidarity, Solitude (1990), Two Cities (1995), Another Beauty (2000) and A Defence of Ardour (2004); all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. His collection of essays Lekka przesada (A slight exaggeration) (2011) is available in German translation as Die kleine Ewigkeit der Kunst: Tagebuch ohne Datum (Hanser, 2014).
Information valid as of spring 2016.