Joseph Brodsky | Nobel laureate, Russian exile, lyric poet
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Joseph Brodsky was a Russian-born American poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987 for his important lyric and elegiac poems. Brodsky left school at age 15 and thereafter began to write poetry while working at a wide variety of jobs. He began to earn a reputation in the
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Encyclopedia Britannica
Joseph Brodsky (born May 24, 1940, Leningrad, Russia, U.S.S.R. [now St. Petersburg, Russia]—died January 28, 1996, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.) was a Russian-born American poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987 for his important lyric and elegiac poems.

Brodsky left school at age 15 and thereafter began to write poetry while working at a wide variety of jobs. He began to earn a reputation in the Leningrad literary scene, but his independent spirit and his irregular work record led to his being charged with “social parasitism” by the Soviet authorities, who sentenced him in 1964 to five years of hard labour. The sentence was commuted in 1965 after prominent Soviet literary figures protested it. Exiled from the Soviet Union in 1972, Brodsky lived thereafter in the United States, becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1977. He was a poet-in-residence intermittently at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, from 1972 to 1980, was a professor of literature at Mount Holyoke College (South Hadley, Massachusetts) from 1981 to 1996, and was a visiting professor at other schools. He received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship grant in 1981 and served as poet laureate of the United States in 1991–92.

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