Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) was born in Prowent, Poland, and was as a poet, translator, and essayist and the 1996 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. In her poems, many of which feature war and terrorism, she employed ironic precision, paradox, and understatement to explore philosophical obsessions. Her reputation rests on a relatively small body of work, fewer than 350 poems; when asked why she had published so few poems, she replied, “I have a trash can in my home.” Writing up till the end, Szymborska died in her Krakow home at the age of eighty-eight.
Photograph by Daniel Malak.
WORKS THAT HAVE APPEARED IN NARRATIVE:
- The Joy of Writing and Other Poems, poetry, in Winter 2020