She served with the Red Cross as a medical auxiliary officer and interpreter during World War II, following British Army forces in 1944-5 across parts of newly liberated Europe.
In 1946, she married Jan Szumigalski, (d. 1985) a former officer in the Polish Army, and lived with him in north Wales before immigrating to Canada in 1951.
[2] Most of her fifteen books are collections of poetry, but she also wrote a memoir, The Voice, the Word, the Text (1990) as well as Z., a play about the Holocaust.
Szumigalski combined a love of the Canadian Prairies with a passion for language, a faith in poetry and an intimate knowledge of literary tradition.
Her 1995 collection Voice, featuring paintings by Marie Elyse St. George, won the Governor General's Award for English language poetry.