Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, known for his work focusing on the September 11, 2001 attack, died Sunday (March 21) in Krakow at the age of 75, Polish media reported citing his editor.
Born in 1945 in Lviv (now Ukraine), Adam Zagajewski was one of Poland's most famous contemporary authors, winner of numerous awards.
He had been cited several times as a possible Nobel Prize for Literature.
He divided his time between Poland and the United States, where he taught literature at the University of Chicago and was known as "the poet of September 11".
He earned this nickname when The
New Yorker
magazine
chose one of his poems -
Try to Praise the Mutilated World
- for the last page of its special issue on the attacks on the United States in 2001.
He was an important member of the literary movement of the Polish New Wave, inspired by the brutal repression by the Communist regime of a wave of student protests across Poland in March 1968. He had moved to Paris in 1982, shortly after. after the last Polish communist leader, General Jaruzelski, tried to suppress Solidarnosc, the first free trade union in the Soviet bloc.
On his return to Krakow in 2002, he won several prizes and distinctions, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Freedom Prize and a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation.