Ryszard Kapuscinski died this night...
Ryszard Kapuscinski. One of my favourite Polish journalists/ writers. A wonderful, warm person. One of the most brilliant minds of the last century...died of cancer only 74 years old. I remember meeting him after his lecture at Gdansk University. I asked him to sign one of his books for my Mum ,as Mother's Day was drawing near. He said to me then "For a Mum, always". Beaming he handed the book to me and wished me good luck with my life. I will never forget his words, his sublime nature. He was emanating warmth and wisdom.
Works which have been translated into in English:
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)
Travels with Herodotus (coming soon; early 2007)
The Polish Bush (1962) - collection of early essays
Black Stars (1963) - about Kwame Nkrumah and Patrice Lumumba
The Kirghiz Dismounts (1968) - essays and articles about (then) Asian and Caucasian Soviet Republic
If All Africa... (1968) - essays and articles about Africa
Why Karl Von Spreti Died (1970) - about Guatemala in 1960s and 1970s, in the background of Karl von Spreti assassination
Christ With a Rifle on His Shoulder (1975) - about partisant movements in Africa, Latin America and Middle East
An Invitation to Georgia (1983)
Notes/The Notebook (1986) - A collection of the author's poetry.
Lapidarium (1990)
Lapidarium II (1995)
Lapidarium III (1997)
Lapidarium IV (2000)
Out of Africa (2000) - The author's first photo album.
Lapidarium V (2002)
A Reporter's Self Portrait (2003) - collections of interviews with and quotes by Kapuściński
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Polish reporter Kapuscinski dies
Kapuscinski became a foreign correspondent in 1962
Poland's most celebrated journalist and non-fiction writer, Ryszard Kapuscinski, has died in Warsaw, aged 74, after a heart operation.
He made his name in Africa in the 1960s, where he was the Polish Press Agency's only correspondent.
He wrote widely on wars and dictators, chronicling the last days of Ethiopia's Haile Selassie and the Shah of Iran.
He also wrote books on the fall of the Soviet Union, Angola's civil war and politics in Central America.
Born in Pinsk, now in Belarus, in 1932, he studied history and worked as a reporter in Poland during the 1950s, giving him material for his first book, The Polish Bush.
Sent abroad in the early 1960s, he was given the job of covering Africa single-handed for the Polish press, travelling widely across the continent and reporting on a number of wars.
"I could not only go wherever I wanted, but it was my job to go wherever I wanted: if there was trouble, I was meant to be there to see it."
He also reported from countries in Asia and South America, witnessing 27 coups or revolutions in all and was sentenced to death four times.
From 1974, he wrote for the weekly Kultura, a period during which he began to gain an international reputation for his books The Emperor, on the fall of Haile Selassie, and Shah of Shahs, about the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
He also wrote The Soccer War, an account of the six-day war between Honduras and El Salvador sparked by a football match.
His final book, Travels with Herodotus, came out two years ago. He also published several volumes of poetry.