Joseph Brodsky

Iosif Brodsky was born in Leningrad in 1940 into a Jewish family; his mother spent the first winter of the siege with him before being evacuated. He left school at fifteen, worked in a factory, at the morgue and on geological expeditions, taught himself Polish and English, and became a protégé of Anna Akhmatova. Convicted in 1964 of parasitism and sentenced to five years of exile and compulsory labour, of which he served eighteen months, he was expelled in 1972 and became an American. Winner of the Nobel Prize in 1987 and Poet Laureate of the United States, he died in New York in 1996 and is buried in Venice.

In the catalogue 1

• PoetryA Part of SpeechЧасть речиJoseph Brodsky · 1977Literature