Salman-Rushdie on kapuscinski.info

On Kapuscinski gonzo orientalism

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

“The European mind is willing to acknowledge its limitations, accept its limitations. It is a sceptical mind. The spirit of criticism does not exist in other cultures. They are proud, believing that what they have is perfect.” – Ryszard Kapuscinski

“The greatest mind to bear upon Africa since Conrad.” – The Evening Standard on Ryszard Kapuscinski

I have tried, just once in my life, to be an Angry Black Man. I planned a picket in New York City against a man I love to hate – Ryszard Kapuscinski. He was going to speak at a conference organised by American PEN. Nobody seemed to want to join me. There were better things to do in New York, like drinking – I do not lie – a hibiscus juice and chilli margarita. So I got drunk.

Polish writer who turned reportage into literature

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Ryszard Kapuscinski, the celebrated Polish journalist who earned a worldwide reputation for his reports from Africa, Asia and Latin America, has died at the age of 74.

Polish and non-Polish journalists alike acknowledged that nobody captured the mood of the developing world, especially of post-colonial Africa, better than Kapuscinski, who died in Warsaw on Tuesday after a long illness.

Whether pricking the pretensions of the court of Ethiopia’s emperor Haile Selassie, or turning the spectacle of the decaying Angolan city of Luanda into a metaphor for the continent, he brought a new dimension to journalism, combining shrewd observation with sympathetic insights. Together with fine writing, albeit sometimes idiosyncratic, these qualities “raised his reportage to the status of literature”, as long-time admirer Michael Ignatieff put it. He was nominated many times for the Nobel literature prize, but the call from Stockholm never came.

The Illuminated Letters Of a Polish Journalist

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Maybe there’s something about those brutal winters on the high northern plains of Eastern Europe, stuck defenseless between Berlin and Moscow, the peasant huts and concrete apartments smelling of dank clothes, lost hope and boiled cabbage.

Maybe there’s something that, every so often, kicks a young writer in the gut, and produces great wanderlust or literary genius or, in the case of Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski and his literary predecessor Joseph Conrad, both.

War Correspondent, Author Ryszard Kapuscinski

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Ryszard Kapuscinski, 74, a danger-courting Polish journalist and widely translated author who covered 27 revolutions and was among the most celebrated war correspondents of his generation, died Jan. 23 at Banacha Hospital in Warsaw after a heart attack. He also had cancer.

With prose that was punchy and lyrical, and in which he was often a central figure amid the action, he became a foremost chronicler of the developing world in his books. Likened to a modern-day nomad, he carried only a camera, a clean shirt and money. “The less you have the better for you,” he said, “because to have is to be killed.”