Epress.am News from Armenia
Polish poet, critic and Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska (also spelled Vislava Šimborska) died of lung cancer at the age of 88, her private secretary Michal Rusinek informed the BBC.
Szymborska, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996, passed away in her sleep at her home in Krakow.
“She has been described as the Mozart of poetry, not without justice in view of her wealth of inspiration and the veritable ease with which her words seem to fall into place. But,… there is also something of the fury of Beethoven in her creative work,” the Nobel Committee said in a press release issued at the time.
Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski said in a statement that Szymborska was our “guardian spirit”.
“In her poems we could find brilliant advice which made the world easier to understand,” Komorowski added, quoted by the Associated Press news agency.
Born in 1923 in Bnin in western Poland, Szymborska made her literary debut in 1945 with the poem “Szukam slowa” (“I am Looking for a Word”) in a Polish daily newspaper.
She was the author of over a dozen collections of poetry and had also translated the works of others from French.