Interview with Ryszard Kapuściński | Bill Buford | Granta

Ryszard Kapuściński | Interview

Ryszard Kapuściński & Bill Buford

‘Mine is not a vocation, it's a mission.’

Ryszard Kapuściński

Ryszard Kapuscinski was born in 1932 in Pinsk in eastern Poland and educated in Warsaw. His first book, The Polish Bush, which reported from the Polish 'frontier', appeared in 1962 and was an immediate best-seller. He travelled widely throughout the Third World as a foreign correspondent, storing up, as he once said in an interview, the experiences for the books that would come later. The first of these books, published in 1968, was based on a journey through Islamic Russia. This was followed by books on Africa, Latin America and South Africa. His first book to be translated into English was The Emperor, based on the last days of Haile Selassie. His other books in English include Another Day of Life, about the war in Angola, and Shah of Shahs, about the revolution in Iran. He is also the author of the highly acclaimed Imperium, the story of his travels across the dying empire of the Soviet Union in 1989, which is also published by Granta Books. Ryszard Kapuscinski died in Warsaw in January 2007 at the age of seventy-four.

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Bill Buford

Bill Buford was for sixteen years the editor of Granta magazine, which he relaunched in 1979. Previously he was the fiction editor at The New Yorker, where he now works as a staff writer. He is the editor of The Granta Book of Travel, The Granta Book of Reportage and The Granta Book of the Family. He is also the author of Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany.

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