Wisława Szymborska was born 2nd July 1923 in what is today Kórnik near Poznań. She lived in Toruń, later Kraków, where she attended elementary school and middle school. During the Second World War, she worked for the railroad. It was then that she began writing her first stories and poems. After the war, she studied Polish literature and sociology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków.
She worked as the editor of several literary publications before getting her first poetry collection This is Why We Live published in 1952. Her debut was well received by the critics. And although the reviews from the first half of the 1950s concerned the ‘correct’ poems later disowned by the poet, and although the criticisms themselves were usually ideological, attention was paid in them to an important aspect of her work confirmed by her later development: the ability to combine a personal viewpoint with a wider social perspective. After the political thaw following the death of Stalin, Szymborska published the breakthrough volume Calling Out to Yeti in 1957. In it she moved away from committed poetry in favour of poetry with a philosophical distance, incessantly wondering at the world, suspicious of doctrines and systems.
In 1991 she received the Goethe Prize, and later the Herder Prize. In 1996 she was awarded the Nobel Prize and in 2011 she received the Order of White Eagle from the Polish government. Her last volume of poetry Here, was published in the United States in 2011. In his review for the New York Times, poet Charles Simic wrote:
More than any poet I can think of, Szymborska not only wants to create a poetic state in her readers, but also to tell them things they didn’t know before or never got around to thinking about.
Her sensitive approach to the unavoidable aspects of the physical world, combined with a keen sense of wit, sincerity and spirit, brought about some of the most significant works of 20th-century poetry.
Source: PAP, Culture.pl