POLAND: Czeslaw Milosz, Poland's Nobel Prize-winning emigré poet and symbol of opposition to totalitarianism, has died at his home in the southern Polish city of Krakow at the age of 93 years.
Described by Joseph Brodsky, another Nobel literary laureate, as "one of the greatest poets of our time, perhaps the greatest", Milosz gave Polish poetry international visibility.
Milosz received his Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980, at the time of the Polish Solidarity movement's challenge to Soviet-style communist rule.
Solidarity founder and former Polish president Lech Walesa said: "He kept on fighting, proposing, encouraging and we finally achieved (these goals)."
Born near what is now Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, he was initially a supporter of Poland's Soviet-imposed communist government after the second World War . He served in Poland's diplomatic corps between 1945 and 1950, before becoming disillusioned.
After defecting to France in 1951, he said: "I did it at the moment when Soviet models became obligatory for Polish writers."
In 1953, his collections of essays The Captive Mind, a scathing attack on Polish writers who collaborated with the government, sent shock waves across the Soviet bloc and rattled Western intellectuals.
In 1960, Milosz moved to the United States, where he taught literature at the University of California in Berkeley .
When receiving his Nobel award in 1980, Milosz spoke almost prophetically of the impending change: "Despite the horror and dangers, our times will be remembered as an inevitable phase of labour pains before mankind crosses a new threshold of awareness."
After the collapse of communism, Milosz returned to Poland. "It is good the elderly writer lived to see a free Poland and its accession into the EU," German writer Karl Decidius, who translated Milosz's works, said after the poet died on Saturday.