Adam Zagajewski at the International Book Fair, Warsaw, May 2010; photo: Marek Dusza
The prize is is awarded every two years by the Zhongkun Poetry Fund in cooperation with Peking University’s Institute of Poetry Studies. It is the only literary distinction of this kind to be awarded to foreigners in China and each edition is awarded to both a Chinese and a foreign poet. This coming March, Zagajewski will also receive in Guangzhou a lifetime achievement award, which has been bestowed on him by the Qi Ling Hou group, an informal association that brings together influential poets born in the 1970s.
Born in former Lwów (current Lviv, Ukraine), in 1945, as an infant Zagajewski was relocated with his family to western Poland. After living in Berlin and Paris for numerous years he returned to settle in Kraków in 2002. He has taught at universities in the United States, including the University of Houston and the University of Chicago. While Zagajewski writes in Polish, many of his books of poetry and essays have been translated into English.
With his early work in protest poetry, Zagajewski was considered one of the “Generation of ’68” or “New Wave” writers in Poland, yet he has moved away from this form in his later work. Reviewer Joachim T. Baer noted Zagajewski’s themes as “the night, dreams, history and time, infinity and eternity, silence and death.” The titles of his collections of poetry suggest some of these concerns: Tremor (1985), Mysticism for Beginners (1997), and World Without End: New and Selected Poems (2002). Zagajewski’s prose collections include Two Cities: On Exile, History and the Imagination (1995) and the memoir Another Beauty (2002).
Zagajewski is a laureate of numerous international literary awards, including the Kurt Tucholsky prize of Sweden, the Paris-based Prix de la Liberté, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Berliner Kunstleprogramm.He was also nominated for the Nobel prize in literature in 2010.
The first Chinese-language collection of Zagajewski’s poems is scheduled to come out next year. It was translated by Professor Wu Lan, whose oeuvre includes works by such authors as Czesław Miłosz and Ryszard Kapuściński.
Edited by Elcin Marasli, 26/11/2013