Nobel Prize-winning poet, Wislawa Szymborska, has died aged 88 in her native Krakow, Poland.

Merseyside Polonia, on behalf of Merseyside’s Polish community would like to express sadness at such a great loss to Polish and world literature and join in mourning with Wislawa Szymborska’s family, friends, and the wider world of literature. We would like to dedicate to Ms. Szymborska our upcoming poetry event, Love in Every Language, on the 9^th February (more info in Write Out Loud calendar of events).

In her Nobel lecture, Ms. Szymborska said that she placed poets among “Fortune's darlings.”

“In the language of poetry . . . nothing is usual or normal,” she said. “Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world. It looks like poets will always have their work cut out for them.”

She spent most of her life in Krakow, through the horrors of  the World War II German occupation, decades of communist rule and martial law. And it was the “ironic precision” with which her poetry illuminated 20th-century history and explored the modern world in “fragments of human reality” that caused the Swedish Academy to award her the Nobel Prize in 1996, even before the fall of the Berlin wall.

She once compared Jozef Stalin to the abominable snowman, in her 1957 collection, Calling out to Yeti, a condemnation of the soviet-inspired restrictions on human and artistic freedom under the communism; an act that could have cost her her life before Stalin’s death in 1953.

Ms. Szymborska denied being a political poet, though recognized that the personal could bleed into the political under a communist regime.

“When I was young, I had a moment of believing in the communist doctrine,” she said. “I wanted to save the world through communism. Quite soon, I understood that it doesn’t work, but I’ve never pretended it didn’t happen to me.”

 “I wanted to do something good for mankind. Soon, I understood that it isn’t possible to save mankind. There’s no need to love humanity, but there is a need to like people. Not love, just like. This is the lesson I draw from the difficult experiences of my youth.”

Her work was translated into more than a dozen languages but she was uncomfortable with the idea of being a celebrated poet.

 “The poet as a person is in a way self-conceited,” she said after the prize was announced. “She has to believe in herself and hope she has something to say.”

She started writing poetry when she was a toddler. “they were clumsy and ridiculous,” she said of her first works. “But when one poem was right, my father took it and gave me some money to buy chocolates. . . . So I can say I started living by my poetry when I was 4.”

The English translations of her books include “Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts” (1981), “People on a Bridge” (1990), “View With a Grain of Sand” (1995), “Nothing Twice” (1997), “Miracle Fair” (2001), “Monologue of a Dog” (2005) and, most recently, “Here” (2010).

Gosia McKane, Polonia, Merseyside.

Gosia is organizing an evening of international love poetry in Liverpool on Thursday 9th February.