ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI is a Polish poet, novelist, translator and essayist. He was born in Lwów (presently in Ukrainian Lviv), Poland, in 1945; as an infant he was relocated with his family to western Poland. He lived in Berlin for a couple of years, moved to France in 1982, and has taught at universities in the United States, including the University of Houston and the University of Chicago. Since 2001 has lived in Cracow, Poland. Zagajewski writes in Polish; many of his books of poetry and essays have been translated into English.
Zagajewski was considered one of the Generation of ’68 or New Wave writers in Poland; his early work was protest poetry, though he has moved away from that emphasis in his later work. The reviewer Joachim T. Baer noted in World Literature Today that Zagajewski’s themes „are the night, dreams, history and time, infinity and eternity, silence and death.” The English 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 has won the Prix de la Liberté as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Berliner Kunstleprogramm. He was awarded the 2004 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award.