WARSAW – Poland’s 1996 Nobel Prize-winning poet Wislawa Szymborska has died at the age of 88.
Her secretary, Michal Rusinek, said that Szymborska died “quietly in her sleep”.
The Nobel award committee’s citation called her the “Mozart of poetry,” a woman who mixed the elegance of language with “the fury of Beethoven”.
Szymborska has been called both deeply political and playful, a poet who used humour in unforeseen ways.
Initially close to the communist government, Szymborska later became a prominent dissident and was influenced by fellow Polish Nobel laureat Czeslaw Milosz. – (Reuters)
