Adam Michnik is a Polish journalist and advocate for human rights and civic society. A prominent dissident in the Communist era, he spent six years as a political prisoner. In the 1970s he was a founding member of the Workers’ Defense Committee and the Flying University, an underground network that brought together intellectuals and activists. In the 1980s Michnik was among leaders of the Solidarity movement and in 1989 among negotiators in the Round Table talks that brought communist rule in Poland to a peaceful end. Between 1989 and 1991 he served in the Sejm, the Polish Parliament.

Michnik is the founder and editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland’s first post-communist independent daily. He is the author of many books, including Letters from Prison and Other Essays (1986), The Church and the Left (1991), Letters from Freedom: Post Cold War Realities and Perspectives (1998), and most recently In Search of Lost Meaning: The New Eastern Europe (2011).