Wisława Szymborska

(1923 - 2012)

Wisława Szymborska started writing poems during World War II in Poland, where she lived and died. In 1996 she won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Czeslaw Milosz wrote in the introduction to one of her last books of poetry, Miracle Fair, that “hers is a very grim poetry…a comparison with the despairing vision of Samuel Beckett and Philip Larkin suggests itself. Yet in contrast to them Szymborska offers a world where one can breathe.”