Czeslaw Milosz was born in Lithuania in 1911. He was one of the leaders of the avant-garde poetry movement in Poland in the 1930s, was in the Resistance during World War II, and edited an anti-Nazi anthology. After several years in the diplomatic service he severed his ties with the post-war Polish government and emigrated to America. In 1978 he was awarded the Neustadt International Poetry Prize and in 1980 the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was Professor Emeritus at the University of California. He died in Krakow in August 2004.