Poland's 'wizard of reportage' dies

POLAND:Poland is mourning the death of journalist and author Ryszard Kapuscinski, whose writings on war and conflict around the world raised reportage to the level of literature.

The Polish parliament held a minute's silence yesterday in honour of Kapuscinksi, who reported on 27 coups, received four death sentences and befriended Che Guevara and Salvador Allende in a career spanning half a century.

He died of a heart attack in a Warsaw hospital on Tuesday night after complications following surgery on his digestive system.

"It is a blow for Polish literature, for Polish culture" said the president Lech Kaczynski. "We had few people like him. It is such a pity that he left us now; I think he could have done so much more."

Kapuscinksi was born in 1932 in the eastern Polish town of Pinsk in Belarus. Educated in Warsaw, he was hired by the Polish news agency PAP as its Africa correspondent in 1962 and sent home gripping dispatches filled with colour, insight and analysis. To escape the restraints of news reporting, he began reworking his material into longer literary essays, writings which lead John Le Carré to dub him the "wizard of reportage".

The first of his works to be translated into English was The Emperor, a series of interviews in which courtiers recounted the last days in 1974 of Ethiopian ruler, Haile Selassie. Later followed Shah of Shahs documenting the Iranian Revolution and the reportage collection The Soccer War, named after the four-day war between Honduras and El Salvador over World Cup qualification matches which left 6,000 dead.

Poland's communist authorities stripped him of his journalism credentials in 1981 because of his sympathies with the pro-democracy movement. One of his most widely-read works, Imperium, captures the stories of ordinary people living in the disintegrating Soviet Union in 1989.

"I write for people everywhere still young enough to be curious about the world," he said in an interview last year, after he was nominated but not awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Shortly before his death, he told Polish radio that revolutions and coups, the subject matter of his writings, were inevitable in an unjust world.

"We are living in a world in which the fruits of progress and development are very unjustly divided and, thanks to television and the media, the poor people, who are in the majority, feel very deeply that they are marginalised. This produces very strong feelings of frustration, unhappiness and eventually hate and revenge."