Adam Zagajewski

Adam Zagajewski was born in June 1945 in Lvov in the Polish Ukraine. He moved to Kraków in 1963, where he studied philosophy at Jagiellonian University, and as a part of the “generation of 1968” was a leader of the oppositional activities of the democratic movement.

Mr. Zagajewski’s first volume of poetry was published in 1972. In 1974, he coauthored a collection of essays with Julian Kornhauser entitled The Unrepresented World. It was enthusiastically received by the younger generation as a literary manifesto. In the following years, three novels appeared.  A selection of his last four volumes of poems appeared in English, entitled Tremor in 1985. In 1990, a volume of his essays entitled Solidarity, Solitude was published in the United States. This was followed by another collection, Canvas, in 1991. Two Cities: On Exile, History, and the Imagination a collection of essays was published by FSG in 1995.  In 1999 FSG published Mysticism for Beginners, a volume of poetry. FSG, also published his memoir, Another Beauty, in 2000, and in 2002, Without End: New and Selected Poems. In recent years, his poems and essays have been translated into several languages, including English, French, German, Swedish and Serbo-Croatian.

From 1981 to 2002, Adam Zagajewski lived in Paris; last year he moved back to Kraków. He is the co-editor of a quarterly Polish-language literary magazine, Cahiers Litteraires. Mr. Zagajewski spends each spring in Houston, where he teaches at the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program.