Tomas Venclova has titles of the honorary doctor from Vilnius University as well as the Vytautas Magnum University in Kaunas, University of Göttingen, Catholic University of Lublin, Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń he is also the international member of Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences. Considered a major figure in world literature, he has received many awards, including the Prize of Two Nations (received jointly with Czesław Miłosz), and The Person of Tolerance of the Year Award from the Sugihara Foundation, among other honours. Since 1980 he has taught Russian and Polish literature at Yale University.

In 1977, following his dissident activities, he was forced to emigrate and was deprived of his Soviet citizenship. He is one of the five founding members of the Lithuanian Helsinki Group. Tomas Venclova is a Lithuanian poet, prose writer, scholar, philologist and translator of literature. The event is hosted by the Centre for Geopolitics and organized by the Lithuanian Culture Institute, Lithuanian Embassy in the UK, the Polish Institute in London, Cambridge Polish Studies, and the Institute for Literary, Cultural and Translation Studies at Vilnius University.

Today, well over a century after Milosz’s birth, the Centre for Geopolitics asks what his work meant in his own time and what it holds for today. The culminating chapter of the book – ‘The lesson of the Baltics’ – tackles the ‘fate of nations trampled down by history’. Milosz became instantly famous on publication of his classic The Captive Mind (1953). He encapsulated in his person the story of the Baltic-Eastern European cultural, national and geopolitical ‘borderlands’. Born in Šeteniai and growing up in Vilnius, the capital of present-day Lithuania, he was a survivor of the Nazi occupation of Poland, a member of the Polish Foreign Service under the communist regime, and then a strong critic of communism. The renowned Polish-Lithuanian writer Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) would have been 110 years old this year.

Organised in cooperation with Cambridge's Centre for Geopolitics, the Lithuanian Culture Institute, Lithuanian Embassy in the UK, the Polish Institute in London, and the Institute for Literary, Cultural and Translation Studies at Vilnius University Watch a recording of the event on YouTube

Postwar Polish Poetry by Czesław Miłosz