Ryszard Kapuściński
Categories: Polish writer stubs | Journalist stubs | 1932 births | Polish journalists | Polish writers
Ryszard Kapuściński listen ▶(?) (born March 4 1932 in Pińsk) is a Polish journalist.
Born in Pińsk, a city that was formerly located in the borderlands of Poland and now belongs to Belarus, Kapuscinski is generally thought of as Poland's leading journalist. After honing his skills on domestic stories, he traveled throughout the world and reporting on wars, coups and revolutions in the Americas, Asia and Europe. However he is best known for his reporting from Africa in the 1960's and 1970's, when he witnessed first-hand the continent's liberation from colonialism.
Starting in the mid-1970s, Kapuscinski has published books of increasing literary craftsmanship characterized by sophisticated narrative technique, psychological portraits of characters, a wealth of stylization and metaphor and unusual imagery that serves as means of interpreting the perceived world. Kapuscinski's best-known book, The Emperor, concerns itself with the decline of Haile Selassie's anachronistic regime in Ethiopia. Shah of Shahs, on the last Shah of Iran, and Imperium, about the last days of the Soviet Union, have enjoyed similar success.
Kapuscinski is fascinated not only by exotic worlds and people, but also by books: he approaches foreign countries first through literature, spending months reading before each trip. He knows how to listen to the people he meets, but he is also capable of "reading" the hidden sense of the scenes he encounters: the way that the Europeans move out of Angola, a discussion regarding alimony in the Tanganyikan parliament, the reconstruction of frescoes in the new Russia - he turns each of these vignettes into a metaphor of historical transformation. This tendency to process private adventures into a greater social synthesis has made Kapuscinski an eminent thinker, and the volumes of his ongoing Lapidarium series are a fascinating record of the shaping of a reporter's observations into philosophical reflections on the world and people.
Selected English bibliography
- Another Day of Life (1976)
- The Soccer War (1978)
- The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat (1978)
- Shah of Shahs (1982)
- Imperium (1993)
- The Shadow of the Sun (2001)
External links
de:Ryszard Kapuściński pl:Ryszard Kapuściński fi:Ryszard Kapuściński sv:Ryszard Kapuscinski