Czesław Miłosz, (born June 30, 1911, Šeteniai, Lithuania, Russian Empire [now in Lithuania]—died August 14, 2004, Kraków, Poland), Polish American author, translator, critic, and diplomat who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980.

The son of a civil engineer, Miłosz completed his university studies in Wilno (now Vilnius, Lithuania), which belonged to Poland between the two World Wars. His first book of verse, Poemat o czasie zastygłym (1933; “Poem of Frozen Time”), expressed catastrophic fears of an impending war and worldwide disaster. During the Nazi occupation he moved to Warsaw, where he was active in the resistance and edited Pieśń niepodległa: poezja polska czasu wojny (1942; “Independent Song: Polish Wartime Poetry”), a clandestine anthology of well-known contemporary poems.