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Polish reporter Kapuscinski dies | Polish reporter Kapuscinski dies |
(about 2 hours later) | |
Poland's most celebrated journalist and non-fiction writer, Ryszard Kapuscinski, has died in Warsaw, aged 74, after a heart operation. | |
He made his name in Africa in the 1960s, where he was the Polish Press Agency's only correspondent. | |
He wrote widely on wars and dictators, chronicling the last days of Ethiopia's Haile Selassie and the Shah of Iran. | |
He also wrote books on the fall of the Soviet Union, Angola's civil war and politics in Central America. | |
Born in Pinsk, now in Belarus, in 1932, he studied history and worked as a reporter in Poland during the 1950s, giving him material for his first book, The Polish Bush. | |
Sent abroad in the early 1960s, he was given the job of covering Africa single-handed for the Polish press, travelling widely across the continent and reporting on a number of wars. | |
"I could not only go wherever I wanted, but it was my job to go wherever I wanted: if there was trouble, I was meant to be there to see it." | |
He also reported from countries in Asia and South America, witnessing 27 coups or revolutions in all and was sentenced to death four times. | |
From 1974, he wrote for the weekly Kultura, a period during which he began to gain an international reputation for his books The Emperor, on the fall of Haile Selassie, and Shah of Shahs, about the 1979 Iranian Revolution. | |
He also wrote The Soccer War, an account of the six-day war between Honduras and El Salvador sparked by a football match. | |
His final book, Travels with Herodotus, came out two years ago. He also published several volumes of poetry. | His final book, Travels with Herodotus, came out two years ago. He also published several volumes of poetry. |