Joseph Brodsky, recipient of the 1987 Nobel Prize for Literature, was born Iosip Aleksandrovich Brodsky, in Leningrad, Russia. His father was a photographer. He left school when he was 15 and began writing poetry. In 1964 he was sentenced to five years in prison for "social parasitism." He was put in Kresty, a famous Soviet prison, before his sentence was commuted. He was exiled from the U.S.S.R. in 1972, and he went to the United States, becoming a U.S. citizen in 1977. In the U.S. he worked as a visiting professor at several colleges and universities. He also became a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, Partisan Review and The Times Literary Supplement.

Brodsky first wrote his poetry in Russian, but he later switched to English. His first collection, Bolshaja Elegua Dzonu Donnu, was published when he was 23 years old. He was named poet laureate of the United States in 1991. Brodsky died of a heart attack in New York in 1996.