Ryszard Kapuscinski was born in 1932 in Pinsk in eastern Poland. He was educated in Warsaw and at the age of twenty-three he was posted to India, his first trip outside Poland. His first book, The Polish Bush, stories of the Polish frontier, appeared in 1962 and was an immediate bestseller. He has since travelled widely throughout the Third World; storing up, as he once said in an interview, the experiences for the books that would come later. The first of these books, published in 1968, was based on a journey through Russia. This was followed by books on Africa, Latin America and South Africa.