Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad (St Petersburg) in 1940 into a Russian-Jewish family. He left school when he was fifteen and began writing poetry three years later. He lived a year (1964-5) in exile in the Arkhangelsk region of northern Russia. In June 1972 he became an involuntary exile and settled in the United States. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987 and served as Poet Laureate of the United States in 1991 and 1992. He died in 1996.