WHEN Wislawa Szymborska won the world's top literary prize in 1996, her friends called it the “Nobel disaster”. This was not just because she had spent an uncomfortable night before the award ceremony ...

The path to international fame as a poet generally doesn't involve writing short poems about sea cucumbers. Yet for the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, who won the Nobel Prize in 1996 and died ...

We don’t always know what life consists of until poetry tells us. Shortly after Wislawa Szymborska won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996, I graduated from college and moved to Poland to teach ...

Wislawa Szymborska could be called the national poet of Poland. The world heard her name in 1996 when she was awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature. Szymborska was 88 when she died this week. And in ...

Winners of the Nobel Prize in literature often experience the loss of obscurity that accompanies the honor as a kind of curse. Their work becomes unassailable, marmoreal: It is “official,” static, ...

What A. thought of me. If B. ever forgave me in the end. Why C. pretended everything was fine. What part D. played in E.’s silence. What F. had been expecting, if anything. Why G. forgot when she knew ...

POOR ALFRED NOBEL, a bit of a writer himself, directed that the prize for literature he endowed honor “the most outstanding work of an idealistic tendency.” That’s not what the Swedish Academy honored ...

Nobel-winning Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska died this week in her home city of Krakow at the age of 88. Little known outside her home country, she was an intensely private person, unaccustomed to the ...

The path to international fame as a poet generally doesn't involve writing short poems about sea cucumbers. Yet for the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, who won the Nobel Prize in 1996 and died ...