Kapuściński's personal journals in book form attracted both controversy and admiration for blurring the conventions of reportage with the allegory and magical realism of literature.

[2][3][4] Notable works include Jeszcze dzień życia (1976; Another Day of Life), about Angola; Cesarz (1978; The Emperor, 1983), about the downfall of Ethiopian ruler Haile Selassie, also considered to be a satire of Communist Poland; Wojna futbolowa (1978; The Soccer War, 1991), an account of the 1969 conflict between Honduras and El Salvador, and other stories from the life of the reporter in Africa and Latin America; Szachinszach (1982; Shah of Shahs, 2006) about the downfall of the last Shah of Iran; Imperium (1993), an account of his travels through the collapsing Soviet Union; Heban (1998), later published in English as The Shadow of the Sun (2001), the story of his years in Africa; and Podróże z Herodotem (2004; Travels with Herodotus), in which he ponders over relevance of The Histories by Herodotus to a modern reporter's job.

Ryszard Kapuściński was born in Pinsk (now in Belarus), Polesie Voivodeship, in the Kresy Wschodnie or eastern borderlands of the Second Polish Republic in 1932, the son of Maria Bobka (b.

When the Second World War began in September 1939 they came back to Pinsk after the city was captured by the Red Army and Ryszard returned to school there.

[8] Kapuściński was the hero of the article published in the weekly periodical Odrodzenie reporting on a poetry conference organised at his school, in which the teenager's poems were compared with works of Mayakovsky and Wierzyński.

[9] In June 1950 he graduated from Gymnasium and started working for the Sztandar Młodych (The Banner of Youth), a nationwide newspaper founded in 1950 as the organ of the ZMP.

His attitude to the PZPR changed early on, "the decisive moment having come in the year 1956" (presumably a reference to the events of Poznań June and the process of de-Stalinisation brought about by the Thaw of Gomułka, and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956).

After publishing, in September 1955, a critical article about the construction of Nowa Huta, a Kraków conurbation built on a site chosen as the "first socialist municipality in Poland",[13] which brought to light the inhuman working and living conditions of the labourers involved in the venture—a story which occasioned consternation before eventually winning favour with the Communist authorities unsure at first how to react to a fault-finding depiction of their pet project by one of their own—Kapuściński was awarded the Golden Cross of Merit at the age of 23.

Beginning with that journey to India undertaken at the age of 24, he travelled across the developing world reporting on wars, coups and revolutions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

The result of his work for the weekly was the book Busz po polsku (The Polish Bush) published in 1962, a collection of his articles from the "Polish wilderness" that he went into to relate "the perspectives of forgotten, invisible, marginal people and so to record a living history of those seldom deemed worthy to enter the annals of official history" (in the words of Diana Kuprel, the literary scholar and translator of Kapuściński's works).

In 1999 Kapuściński talked about his life in VPRO in a series of autobiographical interviews with prominent people from the worlds of science, culture and politics.

[5] From the early 1960s onwards, Kapuściński published books of increasing literary craftsmanship characterized by sophisticated narrative technique, psychological portraits of characters, a wealth of stylization and metaphor and unusual imagery that serves as means of interpreting the perceived world.

He was skilled in listening to the diverse people he met, but he was also capable of "reading" the hidden sense of the scenes he encountered: the way the Europeans moved out of Angola, a discussion regarding alimony in the Tanganyikan parliament, the reconstruction of frescoes in the new Russia—he turned each of these vignettes into a metaphor of historical transformation.

This tendency to process private experiences into a greater social synthesis made Kapuściński an eminent thinker, and the volumes of the ongoing Lapidarium series are a record of the shaping of a reporter's observations into philosophical reflections on the world, its people and their suffering.

He also considered Curzio Malaparte, Melchior Wańkowicz, Ksawery Pruszyński and Franciszek Gil (1917–1960) to have been his literary models and stylistic precursors.

[16][39][40][41][42] On some level, Pruszyński and Wańkowicz shared a very similar approach to facts with Kapuściński, believing that the general picture of the story can be glued from bits and pieces to reveal a truth as a wholly independent construct.

[56] In Ten Inny ("The Other"), a collection of lectures delivered in Vienna, Graz and Kraków, published shortly before his death, Kapuściński laments a state of affairs perpetuated by the myths which inculcate the notion of the Other as sub-human or non-human.

Rozmowy z młodzieżą; Kraków, Znak, 2008) is a record of Kapuściński's interactions with the students of the University of Bolzano in Italy in October 2006;[57] while Rwący nurt historii.

Kapuściński's pronouncements on current affairs were noteworthy: he thought that the causes of the 9/11 tragedy, for example, were too complex to lend themselves to an exhaustively thorough analysis at present, although he offered an extensive and sophisticated exposition of some of the key elements of the puzzle in the Clash of Civilisations.

[60] In an interview granted in 2002 to the then editor-in-chief of the monthly Letras Libres, Ricardo Cayuela Gally, Kapuściński opined that the war on terror, owing to the asymmetrical character of the combatants engaged in it, could only be won—and indeed easily, within a month—through a (re)introduction of "Stalinism", a method undesirable for the sole reason that it would leave the world under the permanent "hegemony" of the United States, a circumstance that would spell the end of "the free society".

Los Angeles Times wrote: "Big events (...) may have been treated lyrically in his prose, but (...) these poems capture the moments between crises, impressions that carry a book-length argument in a few lines".

[65][66] Aleksandar Hemon, the Bosnian-American novelist (who had previously impugned Robert D. Kaplan's stereotyping of "the Balkan mind"), in a critique of Kapuściński's Africa writings published in The Village Voice,[citation needed] accused Kapuściński's readers of turning a blind eye to "the underlying proto-racist essentialism" that informs his vision of and his approach to the cultures of the continent: "[Kapuściński] fumes against the racism absurdly based on skin colour, and would probably be shocked if told that his obsessive listing of essential differences [between "the African mind" and "the European mind"] is essentially racist".

His account of how the Hutus and the Tutsis were drawn into that dark night of genocide in Rwanda is the most enlightening I have read anywhere" and that he had "transformed journalism into literature in his writings about Africa".

Truth, Christians has written, is "reason radiated by love", thus individual authenticity must be contingent on links to the other, the "I" always defined by its relationship to "Thou".

[88] In 2005 the Italian edition of Kapuściński's poems (which appeared in print the previous year as Taccuino d'appunti in the translation of Silvano De Fanti) won the state-funded Naples Prize (Premio Napoli).

[92] In 2010, Warsaw City Council established the Ryszard Kapuściński Award as a form of distinction and promotion of the most worthwhile reportage books which touch on important contemporary issues, evoke reflection, and deepen our knowledge of the world of other cultures.

[97] Ryle continued: In answer to such criticisms it has been argued that The Emperor is not meant to be about Ethiopia at all, that it is an allegory of Communist power in Poland, or of autocratic regimes in general.

Consider the hypothetical case of an author publishing a book of scandalous revelations about the last years of the Gierek regime in communist Poland, using dubious information obtained in obscure circumstances from anonymous and untraceable members of the Polish Internal Security Police.

Professor Silvano De Fanti from the University of Udine wrote Kapuściński's biography for the Opere (2009), published in Italian in the Meridiani series which aims to collect major writers of all times from all countries.

[109] They oppose the accusation of creating a myth, and his own legend, as well as confabulations and opportunism, showing a selected and tendentious usage of the author's life knowledge, the lack of comprehension of literary reportage, manipulation with texts and quotations, as well as numerous factual and technical mistakes made by Domosławski.