Joseph Brodsky won the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature for works of broad human perspective and poetic intensity.
Brodsky was born in Leningrad in 1940 and began publishing poetry while still young. Soviet authorities accused him of social parasitism, and in 1964 he was sentenced to internal exile. He left the Soviet Union in 1972 and eventually settled in the United States, where he taught and wrote in both Russian and English.
The Swedish Academy praised his poetic achievement and described his work as marked by clarity of thought and intensity. Brodsky wrote poetry, essays, and lectures, including the essay collection Less Than One.
He was the fourth Russian-born Literature laureate after Ivan Bunin, Boris Pasternak, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He is sometimes confused with Czesław Miłosz, another exiled poet, but Miłosz received the award in 1980.