Nobel Prize Recipient for Literature. Wislawa Szmborska was a Polish poet. According to the Nobel Prize committee, she received the coveted award "for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality." A poetess, she was honored in 1996 for a small but intense body of work that sometimes got her in trouble during the Communist years. Raised in Krakow from age eight, she showed an early love of literature and received at least a portion of her education in underground schools. During World War II, she avoided being sent to a labor camp by working on the railroad and also became a textbook illustrator. In 1945 she published her first poem and commenced a study of the Polish language at Jagiellonian University of Krakow. Szymborska left school due to lack of money and around 1948 entered into a brief marriage with poet Adam Wlodek. Having released her first poem in 1945, she published a collection of her work in 1949 though she was initially unable to get it past the Communist censors. She continued writing, her works following the loyal Communist Party line in glorifying Lenin, Stalin, and the "socialist ideal" and in 1953 joined the staff of "Literary Life" as an editor and critic, a job she would hold until 1981. Sometime in the late 1950s, she became disenchanted with Communism and though she retained Party membership until 1966, she gradually became more open in her criticism of the regime, along the way renouncing her early body of work. Through the 1980s, she aligned herself with the Solidarity Movement, though she wrote under a pseudonym for self-protection. While a private and shy person, she gradually became known to the outside world, her works translated into all the European languages as well as English, Russian, Chinese, Hebrew, and Arabic. In later days she was a respected translator of French literature into Polish. Besides the Nobel Prize, she received the Goethe Prize in 1991 and the Herder Prize in 1995. Her poetic canon of only about 200 pieces. Szymborska lived out her days in Krakow and died of lung cancer. At her demise, her works were available nearly everywhere. When asked why she published so few poems she said simply: "I have a trash can in my home."