Wisława Szymborska

Wisława Szymborska was born near Poznań, where her father was steward to Count Władysław Zamoyski; the family moved to Toruń and then, in 1931, to Kraków, the city she lived in for the rest of her life. During the German occupation she continued her education in secret classes. After the war she studied Polish literature and then sociology at the Jagiellonian University and began to publish poems. From 1953 to 1981 she worked at the literary weekly Życie Literackie, as poetry editor and later as the author of a long-running column of book reviews.

Her first collections conformed to the socialist realism of the early 1950s, and she later disowned them. With Calling Out to Yeti (1957) her own voice emerged: brief, lucid, quietly sceptical, and attentive to what the large systems of history and ideology leave out. Her poems take up an onion, a cat in an empty flat, a terrorist’s timed bomb, the chance meeting of two strangers, and ask what each reveals about contingency and the limits of knowledge. She published sparingly, a slim volume every several years, and her irony was always tempered with tenderness.

The Nobel Prize brought her an international readership through translators such as Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh, though she guarded her privacy and gave few interviews. She continued writing into her final years in Kraków, where she died in 2012.