Czesław Miłosz was born in Lithuania in 1911 and lived in Poland until 1951, when he was granted asylum in France. He was the author of dozens of books, including the poetry books Facing the River and Collected Poems, and the prose volumes A Year of the Hunter and Beginning with My Streets. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980, and taught at the University of California, Berkeley from 1961 to 1998. He died in Kraków in 2004.
