Born in Poznań, Poland on November 13, 1946, Barańczak was raised by his father Jan and mother Zofia, both doctors.

After the political events of June 1976, he became a co-founder of the Workers' Defence Committee (KOR) and of the clandestine quarterly Zapis.

In 1981, the year Poland declared martial law, he left the country and accepted a three-year contract to work as a lecturer at Harvard University.

[1] He was a co-founder of the Paris Zeszyty Literackie (Literary Textbooks) in 1983, and a regular contributor to the periodical Teksty Drugie.

His book, Surgical Precision (Chirurgiczna precyzja), won the 1999 Nike Award - Poland's top literary prize.

The language he employed in his works is highly evocative of the poetry of Emily Dickinson, John Donne and Robert Frost, with whom he felt strongest connection and whose literary legacy he helped popularize in Poland.