SOURCE: "Polish Poet, Observer of Daily Life, Wins Nobel," in The New York Times, October 4, 1996, p. C5.

[Below, Berlez offers reminiscences of Szymborska from friends and writers in Poland.]

Wislawa Szymborska, a self-effacing 73-year-old Polish poet who collects trashy postcards because she says trash has no pretensions, won the Nobel Prize for Literature today.

This year's prize is the biggest ever, $1.12 million The announcement by the Swedish Academy surprised some in the literary world who had expected the 1996 award to go to a novelist because last year's winner was the Irish poet Seamus Heaney.

Ms. Szymborska, whose name is pronounced vees-WAH-wah sheem-BOR-ska, is little known outside Poland, where she is revered as a distinguished poet from the intellectual center of Cracow. She stresses the quirks and unexpected nature of daily life and of personal relations in poetry that spans five decades. Her early work, which she has since...