As much about the plastic water container as the warlord and preferring the African shanty town to the Manhattan skyscraper as a monument to human achievement, what Kapuściński, the author of Shah of Shahs describes is not Africa, which he claims does not exist except geographically, but a distillation of life itself, through its religiosity, its trees, the frightening abundance of youth, sun that " curdles the blood " and terrorising, ruling armies that fall in a day.

Kapuściński claimed, in response to a question posed by Adam Michnik, that his attitude to Communism 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 Uprising ), although he remained a loyal member of the Party until December 1981 and never spoke out against it afterwards, including during the period of the Third Republic following the Party's self-dissolution in January 1990.

In his early youth Kapuściński started writing for the Sztandar Młodych, a nationwide newspaper founded in 1950 as the organ of the central organisation of the Communist youth, the ZMP, of which he was a member.

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.

However, in Autoportret reportera (" A Reporter's Self-portrait "; 2003 ), Kapuściński credits his early beginnings as a poet for his becoming a journalist in the end: " I wrote poems the early part of my life, but they were all very bad (...) ' occasional ' pieces (...) but it is precisely those poems that led me to journalism ".

Notwithstanding such self-judgements, it is untrue that all of Kapuściński's early verses were " very bad ": some of them ( to be sure, likewise not all ) reveal a level of prosodic finesse and a degree of genuinely poetic sensibility and conceptual sophistication of which a schoolboy could be rightfully proud ; the poem entitled " Uzdrowienie " ( Healing ), with its expertly codified trope of Christ, published in the periodical Dziś i jutro in August 1949 when Kapuściński was 17, could be cited as an example.

After publishing, in September 1955, a critical article about the construction of Nowa Huta, a Cracow conurbation built on a site chosen by Soviet " advisors " as the " first socialist municipality in Poland ", which brought to light the inhuman working and living conditions of the labourers involved in the venture — a story which occaioned 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.

In 1962 Kapuściński joined the Polish press agency, the PAP, and after honing his skills on domestic stories was appointed " its only foreign correspondent, and for the next ten years he was ' responsible ' for fifty countries.

In the English-speaking world, Kapuściński is best known for his reporting from Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, when he witnessed first-hand the end of the European colonial empires on that continent.

Both Terzani and Kapuściński had been accused of espionage, though with diametrically opposite moral implications of the fact ( Terzani having been arrested in China in February 1984, and subsequently expelled from that country, on the charge of promoting democracy ).

Jaime Abello Banfi, the friend and associate of Gabriel García Márquez, reports that García Márquez and Kapuściński, unbeknownst to each other, shared the opinion that the way to good journalism led through poetry ( on account of the fact that it inculcates both the conciseness of expression and its aptness ).

" Kapuściński died on 23 January 2007 of a heart attack suffered in a Warsaw hospital where he was being treated for unrelated ailments.

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

( The censorship of the American edition, ironic in a book that deals in part with the terror of pervasive censorship unleashed on the people of Iran by the Shah's security agency, the SAVAK, has never been satisfactorily explained, and is not fully elucidated even in Domosławski's latest biography of Kapuściński ( see section " Controversial biography ", below ).

Kapuściński was the hero ( not entirely unjustifiably ) of the article published in the weekly periodical Odrodzenie on the morrow of his 18th birthday ( 5 March 1950 ) reporting on a poetry conference organised at his high school, in which the teenager's poems were compared to those of some of the best-known European poets ( including Mayakovsky and Wierzyński ).

In an interview granted in 2002 to the well-known Mexican writer and ( the then ) editor-in-chief of the monthly Letras Libres, Ricardo Cayuela Gally ( b. 1969 ), Kapuściński opined that the war on terror, owing to the asymmetrical character of the combatants engaged in it, could only be wonand indeed easily, within a monththrough 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 ".

Some ( limited ) light has been thrown on Kapuściński's lifelong visceral anti-Americanism by Monroe Edwin Price ( b. 1938 ), professor in the University of Pennsylvania, in his book Television, the Public Sphere, and National Identity published in 1995, but in general nowhere in his writings does Kapuściński respond to or engage in any remotely sophisticated way with the classic exposition of the reasons for anti-Americanism formulated in various publications by the French philosopher, Jean-François Revel ( for whom Kapuściński would seem to have served as a case study ).

Kapuściński seems to have anticipated the Arab Spring in positing a concept of " global society " ( społeczeństwo planetarne ), in effect a body of " 6 billion people whom nobody can insinuate anything, on whom nobody can impose anything ".

At the same time, Kapuściński never revealed in his public reporting on the Angolan conflict the presence in Angola of Cuban " instructors " and the participation of units of Cuban soldiers in the armed combat on the side of the MPLA ( making only veiled references to the fact with expressions like, " the MPLA is not bereft of all support "), while at the same time expatiating on the Egyptian, Portuguese, and South African mercenaries fighting on the side of FNLA and UNITA.

When, towards the end of the decade of the 1980s, during a book-launch ceremony for one of the foreign editions of Another Day of Life, someone asked Kapuściński whether, in the interests of impartiality, he had explored the motivations of the other players in the Angolan conflict, specifically the points of view of UNITA and of FNLA, he replied: " Nobody gave me an opportunity to do so " ( reported in Artur Domosławski, Kapuściński non-fiction ).

Kapuściński demanded of his newspaper to be sent abroad ( later in life claiming that what he had had in mind was Czechoslovakia ).

Kapuściński himself called his work " literary reportage ", and reportage d ' auteur.

Pruszyński indeed, together with Franciszek Gil ( 1917 – 1960 ), were the two literary personages whom Kapuściński himself invoked as unattainable ideals for any journalist.

Kapuściński himself cites Kisch with approval as the " classic of reportage " who dealt a death blow to traditional forms of reporting by putting the person of the reporter at centre stage.

) A respected Polish journalist, Monika Olejnik ( b. 1956 ), attributes this instance of censorship to Kapuściński himself, who was allegedly motivated by his own scruples.

The newspaper article having been a commissioned piece, the outcome of the incident was a function, ultimately, of the infighting of competing factions within the Communist Party, Jerzy Morawski, one of the leaders of the Pulavian Faction and a secretary of the Central Committee, being instrumental in bringing the matter to a resolution successful for Kapuściński.

Ryszard Kapuściński (; March 4, 1932 – January 23, 2007 ) was a Polish journalist and writer whose dispatches in book form brought him a global reputation.

The Emperor was also the book that established Kapuściński ’ s reputation in the West.

Ryszard Kapuściński wrote about this book " A great book written in the best traditions of literary journalism ... profound, rich and reflective ".

* Imperium ( Polish book ), a 1993 book by the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński

The story of his assassination by Guatemalan guerillas was depicted in a 1970 book Why Karl Von Spreti Died by Ryszard Kapuściński.

* Shah of Shahs, a book of Ryszard Kapuściński

The Shadow of the Sun (, literally " Ebony ") is a non-fiction book by the Polish writer Ryszard Kapuściński, published in English translation in 2001.

* Kapuściński, Ryszard.

** Ryszard Kapuściński, Polish journalist ( d. 2007 )

An altar boy in a Roman Catholic church in his childhood, Kapuściński in his adolescence became an amateur ( bantamweight ) boxer of some note and a poet who won two magazine prizes in 1950.

According to some, Italian journalist Tiziano Terzani and Ryszard Kapuściński shared a similar vision of journalism.

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.

Kapuściński confirmed to Bill Deedes the fact that Conrad was one of his literary inspirations.

Neal Ascherson, Kapuściński's contemporary and a connoisseur of his work ( b. 1932 ), likened him to Egon Erwin Kisch ( 1885 – 1948 ), the German-speaking left-leaning citizen of Czechoslovakia considered the father of literary reportage, " who travelled the globe to stimulate the fantasies " of his readers ( and who, like Kapuściński, spent a number of years in Mexico ).

In a 2006 interview with Reuters, Kapuściński said that he wrote for " people everywhere still young enough to be curious about the world.

From 1952 and till his death Ryszard Kapuściński was married to doctor Alicja Mielczarek.

Kapuściński was fascinated by the humanity he found in different worlds and people, as well as the books of these worlds and people: he approached foreign countries first through literature, spending months reading before each trip.