Ryszard Kapuscinski

Biography of a Writer

Beata Nowacka, Zygmunt Ziątek, Lindsay Davidson

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9780228014485
• eBook ISBN:
  9780228015567
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Journalist Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

An award-winning writer and a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature, Ryszard Kapu?ci?ski (1932–2007) was a celebrated Polish journalist and author. Praised for the lengths to which he would go to get a story, Kapu?ci?ski gained an extraordinary knowledge of the major global events of the second half of the twentieth century and shared it with his diverse audience.

The first posthumous monograph on the writer's life and work, Ryszard Kapu?ci?ski confronts the mixed reception of Kapu?ci?ski's tendency to merge the conventions of reportage with the artistry of literature. Beata Nowacka and Zygmunt Zi?tek discuss the writer's accounts of the decolonization of Africa and his work in Asia and South America between 1956 and 1981, a period during which Kapu?ci?ski reported on twenty-seven revolutions and coups. They argue that the journalistic tradition is not in conflict with Kapu?ci?ski's meditations on the deep meanings of these events, and that his first-person involvement in his text was not an indulgence detracting from his journalistic adventures but a well-thought-out conception of eyewitness testimony, developing the moral and philosophical message of the stories. Exploring the whole of Kapu?ci?ski's achievements, Nowacka and Zi?tek identify a constant tension between a strictly journalistic position and what in Poland is called literary reportage, located on the border between journalism and artistic prose.

Kapu?ci?ski's desire and dedication to make more of journalistic writing is the driving force behind the excellence and readability that have made his legendary books so controversial – and so widely celebrated.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Translator’s Note
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 “We were children of the war …”
• 2 “A metric of our generation”
• 3 Incidental Polish and African Tales
• 4 PAP Correspondent or Traveller?
• 5 On His Own Account
• 6 “I decided not to write like that anymore”
• 7 “Those were the days of constant emotion …”: The Polish Revolution, 1980–1982
• 8 “REE-shard Kah-poosh-CHIN-skee”: Kapuściński in English
• 9 “High time I started writing the next unwritten book”
• 10 Return to the Origins?
• 11 “He who created his own world will survive …”
• Timeline
• Bibliographical Note
• Notes
• Index of Names