Daniel Passent
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Daniel Passent (* April 28, 1938 in Stanisławów, Poland (now Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine)) is a polish journalist.
Daniel Passent studied journalism in Warsaw, Leningrad, at Princeton University and Harvard University in the 1950s and 1960s. Already in his second year of studies at the university of Warsaw (1956) he started as a journalist at the communist youth magazine Sztandar Młodych. From 1959 on he has been working for the political weekly Polityka, interrupted only by stays abroad.
During his studies he wrote satirical texts for the student standup comedy group STS (Studencki Teatr Satyryków). This is also where he met his wife Agnieszka Osiecka, famous poet and lyricist. Their daughter, Agata Passent, studied in Harvard and is now also a journalist.
In addition to his articles and columns he has written several books, among others about the Vietnam War, the Olympic Summer Games 1972 in Munich, about the drug problem in the USA, and about the only Polish world class tennis player, Wojciech Fibak.
From 1990 to 1997 he was a journalist in Boston for the Spanish monthly magazine El Diario Mundial.
Between 1997 and 2002 Passent served as a Polish ambassador to Chile.
Passent also translated books and other texts by James Baldwin and Martin Luther King into Polish.
Currently he writes a very popular column in the Polish weekly Polityka and maintains a Polish language blog called En passant.
Passent speaks Polish, English, German, Spanish and Russian.
[edit] Controversial past
An article[1] in conservative Polish newspaper Dziennik, claimed that Passent worked in the 1960s as a spy for the communist government, under the codenames "Daniel" and "John". Passent has asked for an independent court to review such claims through a procedure called lustration; this request has been denied[2] as Poland's lustration law applies only to people holding (or running for) a public office.
