The poet became strongly linked to the former royal city below Wawel Castle. She attended the Urszulanki Sisters’ Gymnasium then participated in underground educational gatherings during the German occupation, finishing her secondary school exams in 1941. She became a railway clerk in 1943, to avoid being deported to Germany.
With her unusual artistic talent, Szymborska illustrated a new edition of Jan Stanisławski's textbook First Steps in English. She kept writing, debuting in Kraków's "Polish Daily" in 1945 with the poem Looking for a Word. She studied Polish philology at the Jagiellonian University a year later, then changed to sociology before financial troubles forced her to discontinue her university education.
Poet and editor
She married the poet Adam Włodek in 1948. The couple moved to the House of Writers in Krupnicza Street 22, a meeting point for great literary figures. Their marriage ended 1954, but they remained friends after their divorce. Szymborska became involved with the writer Kornel Filipowicz fifteen years later. They never married and lived separately.
Her first volume of poetry, That’s Why We Are Alive, was published in 1952, the year she joined the Polish Writers’ Association. Szymborska did not include poems from this collection in future selections and anthologies, or the work from her second volume, Questioning Yourself, which was also written in the style dictated by that political era. Jerzy Illg, in the book On Nobel Prizewinners, Cabarets, Friendships, Books, Women (2009), quoted Szymborska’s reply concerning her affiliations in these early poems:
Well, I was unfortunate enough to be young, naive and clueless about things I should’ve evaluated properly right away. Some have the right to judge me harshly for that – if they really think that a few poems written back then mean more than all the works I wrote later.
Szymborska headed the poetry department at the periodical Literary Life from 1953 to 1966, co-editing the Literary Post section with Włodzimierz Maciąg. In her column "Non-required Reading" she published feullietons (1967-1981), later reprinted in other newspapers and magazines and collected in book form. She collaborated with Tygodnik Powszechny from 1983, and became involved with the monthly NaGłos (OutLoud). She joined the PEN Club in 1988 and became an honourary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2001.