About
Joseph Brodsky, born Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky in Leningrad, left school at 15 and educated himself while working various jobs. He began writing poetry around 1957 and was championed by Anna Akhmatova. Convicted of social parasitism in 1964, he was exiled from the USSR in 1972 and settled in the United States. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987, he served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 1991 to 1992. He died in New York in 1996.
* 1940-05-24 — † 1996-01-28
Major works
- A Part of Speech (1980)poetry collection
- Less Than One (1986)essays
- To Urania (1988)poetry collection
- Watermark (1992)essay
- On Grief and Reason (1996)essays
Key milestones
- 1964Convicted of social parasitism to five years of hard labor, sentence commuted after 18 months.
- 1987Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
- 1991Appointed U.S. Poet Laureate, the first foreign-born writer to hold the post.
Themes
ExileMemoryLanguageTimeMetaphysics
Sources: nobelprize.org · britannica.com
