At the end of this week the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz will be 90. One of the great figures of 20th-century literature, Milosz was born in the countryside of Lithuania before the Russian Revolution and witnessed the destruction of Warsaw in the Second World War. After the war he left Poland to begin a new life as an exile, first in France and then in California, only returning afterwinning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. The programme mimics the ABC form of Milosz's recent memoirs to provide an alphabetical profile of his life and work, which includes novels and books of essays such as The Captive Mind- one of the classic accounts of an intellectual's struggle with communism. Milosz provides the guide to his own life in interviews conducted forthe programme, together with contributions from Seamus Heaney , Helen Vendler , Tomas Venclova , Adam Zagakewski and from otherfriends and colleagues.