page_title: Czesław Miłosz
section_title: Honors
hierarchical_section_title: Czesław Miłosz / Honors
caption_attribution_description: English: 100th Anniversary of Czeslav Milosz
context_page_description: Czesław Miłosz was a Polish-American poet, prose writer, translator, and diplomat. Regarded as one of the great poets of the 20th century, he won the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature. In its citation, the Swedish Academy called Miłosz a writer who "voices man's exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts".
  Miłosz survived the German occupation of Warsaw during World War II and became a cultural attaché for the Polish government during the postwar period. When communist authorities threatened his safety, he defected to France and ultimately chose exile in the United States, where he became a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His poetry—particularly about his wartime experience—and his appraisal of Stalinism in a prose book, The Captive Mind, brought him renown as a leading émigré artist and intellectual.
  Throughout his life and work, Miłosz tackled questions of morality, politics, history, and faith. As a translator, he introduced Western works to a Polish audience, and as a scholar and editor, he championed a greater awareness of Slavic literature in the West. Faith played a role in his work as he explored his Catholicism and personal experience.
context_section_description: In addition to the Nobel Prize in Literature, Miłosz received the following awards:
  Polish PEN Translation Prize (1974)
  Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts (1976)
  Neustadt International Prize for Literature (1978)
  National Medal of Arts (United States, 1989)
  Robert Kirsch Award (1990)
  Order of the White Eagle (Poland, 1994)
  Miłosz was named a distinguished visiting professor or fellow at many institutions, including the University of Michigan and University of Oklahoma, where he was a Puterbaugh Fellow in 1999. He was an elected member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He received honorary doctorates from Harvard University, the University of Michigan, the University of California at Berkeley, Jagiellonian University, Catholic University of Lublin, and Vytautas Magnus University in Lithuania. The last institution also has an academic center named for Miłosz.
  In 1992, Miłosz was made an honorary citizen of Lithuania, where his birthplace was made into a museum and conference center. In 1993, he was made an honorary citizen of Kraków.
  His books also received awards. His first, A Poem on Frozen Time, won an award from the Union of Polish Writers in Wilno. The Seizure of Power received the Prix Littéraire Européen (European Literary Prize). The collection Roadside Dog received a Nike Award in Poland.
  In 1989, Miłosz was named one of the "Righteous Among the Nations" at Israel's Yad Vashem memorial to the Holocaust, in recognition of his efforts to save Jews in Warsaw during World War II.
  Miłosz has also been honored posthumously. The Polish Parliament declared 2011, the centennial of his birth, the "Year of Miłosz". It was marked by conferences and tributes throughout Poland, as well as in New York City, at Yale University, and at the Dublin Writers Festival, among many other locations. The same year, he was featured on a Lithuanian postage stamp. Streets are named for him near Paris, Vilnius, and in the Polish cities of Kraków, Poznań, Gdańsk, Białystok, and Wrocław. In Gdańsk there is a Czesław Miłosz Square. In 2013, a primary school in Vilnius was named for Miłosz, joining schools in Mierzecice, Poland, and Schaumburg, Illinois, that bear his name.
caption: Lithuanian stamp, 100th anniversary of Miłosz's birth
exif: {}