SOURCE: Gajer, Ewa. “Polish Poet Wisława Szymborska.” Hecate 23, no. 1 (May 1997): 140-42.

In the following essay, Gajer offers a concise overview of Szymborska's poetic career, culminating in her 1996 Nobel Prize.

On October 30 1996, 73-year-old Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska won the Nobel Prize for Literature ‘for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality.’¹

Szymborska is the fifth Pole to win the prize. In 1905, the novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz won it for the book Quo Vadis which depicted the persecution of Christians in ancient Rome. Wladyslaw Stainslaw Reymont (who influenced some of Katharine Susannah Prichard's writing) got the prize in 1924 for The Peasants, an epic description of Polish country life. Fifty-four years later, Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Polish-Jewish writer living in the US, won the prize for his portrayal of the Jewish community in Poland. The poet Czeslaw Milosz...