Polish author Ryszard Kapuscinski dies
Polish author and journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, several times cited as a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature, died on January 22 at the age of 74, TVN24 television reported.
Kapuscinski’s books have been translated into 30 languages, arguably more than any other Polish author.
Among his best known books are The Emperor (Downfall of an Autocrat), an insider’s view of the fall of Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie; Shah of Shahs, about the last shah of Iran; and Imperium, about the last days of the Soviet Union.
Born in Pinsk, now part of Belarus, in 1932, Kapuscinski was renowned for his journalism, having covered dozens of conflicts, coups and revolutions in Latin America, Asia and in Africa.
In 1964, after honing his skills on domestic stories, he “was appointed by the Polish Press Agency as its only foreign correspondent, and for the next ten years he was ‘responsible’ for fifty countries”, according to Wikipedia.
When he finally returned to Poland, he had lived through twenty-seven revolutions and coups. In the English speaking world, Kapuőciñski is best known for his reporting from Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, when he witnessed first-hand the end of the European colonial empires on that continent.
