Ryszard Kapuściński

(1932 - 2007)

Ryszard Kapuściński was hired as a reporter for the Communist Party’s youth newspaper in 1950, and the following year he enrolled in the University of Warsaw. He went abroad on assignment for the first time in 1956—to India, Afghanistan, and Pakistan—and six years later became the Polish Press Agency’s only correspondent covering the emerging independence movements in Africa. Kapuściński claimed to have witnessed twenty-seven coups and revolutions over the course of his career. Of his writing he said, “You could call it, I suppose, personal reportage…I sometimes call it literature by foot.”