Wisława Szymborska

Wisława Szymborska was a Polish poet; winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. She lived in Kraków from 1931. From 1943 she worked on the railway, and managed to avoid being sent to forced labor by the Nazis. Her first experience in art dates back to this period - as an illustrator of an English language textbook by Jan Stanisławski. She also began writing poetry and short stories. After the war, she took part in the literary life of Kraków, and until 1946 she belonged to the literary group "Inaczej", and felt the influence of Czesław Milosz. In 1945-1948 she studied Polish literature and then sociology at the Jagiellonian University, but did not graduate; she later conducted poetry seminars there. Szymborska's works are characterized by philosophical and moral issues, the poetics of confession and reflexivity, the connection between the eternal and the momentary, the existing and the non-existent, irony close to the grotesque, laconic metaphor, rational construction of the poem. She translated works of French poets into Polish. In 1996, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for poetry that describes historical and biological phenomena in the context of human reality with extreme precision."