ABSTRACT
Ryszard Kapuściński (1932–2007) was a journalist and foreign correspondent known for the quality of his writing and for continually putting himself in harm’s way with his embedded reporting from revolutions and danger spots around the world. Among his best works were Cesarz (Caesar, 1978), about Ethiopia, and Imperium (1993), about the last days of the Soviet Union. One of Poland’s most frequently translated authors, Kapuściński was at one point raised as a possible candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature, as his writing could be classified as literary journalism. In other words, he sometimes embellished the truth to make a good story. His widely suspected role as an informer for the Polish security services in 1965–72 would have impeded his selection. The following talk was delivered to the 66th World Congress of the PEN Club, 1 held in Warsaw, in June 1999. It was published in Gazeta Wyborcza (1999–0626), a nationally circulated daily newspaper.
