Ryszard Kapuściński

Ryszard Kapuściński was born in Pinsk (now Belarus) in 1932 and spent his career as the sole foreign correspondent for the Polish Press Agency in the developing world — a job that put him in the way of more political violence than almost any other journalist of his generation.

He was present at 27 revolutions and coups across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. He was sentenced to death four times. He survived four wars. And he wrote about all of this not as conventional journalism but as literary prose that moved between immediate event and historical depth, between the reporter's eye and the novelist's ear.

The Emperor (1978) is an account of Haile Selassie's court told entirely through the words of former courtiers — a portrait of absolute power that reads simultaneously as Ethiopian history, political allegory, and moral analysis. Numerous African leaders who read it recognised their own situations.

The Soccer War (1978) collects his dispatches from conflicts in Latin America and Africa. Shah of Shahs (1982) is about the Iranian Revolution. The Shadow of the Sun (2001) — his retrospective account of thirty years in Africa — is the most complete picture of post-colonial Africa that any single journalist produced.

Some of his accounts have been disputed by other journalists who were in the same places; he sometimes compressed time or heightened drama. Whether this disqualifies him from journalism or merely locates him in a different tradition is a question his admirers debate.