Born in Prowent (now part of Kórnik in west-central Poland), she resided in Kraków until the end of her life.

[5] Szymborska was awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature "for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality".

[4][9] In 1948, she quit her studies without a degree, due to poor financial circumstances; the same year, she married poet Adam Włodek, whom she divorced in 1954.

[11][12][13] Her early work supported socialist themes, as seen in her debut collection Dlatego żyjemy (That is what we are living for), containing the poems "Lenin" and "Młodzieży budującej Nową Hutę" ("For the Youth who are building Nowa Huta"), about the construction of a Stalinist industrial town near Kraków.

[4] As early as 1957, she befriended Jerzy Giedroyc, the editor of the influential Paris-based émigré journal Kultura, to which she contributed.

In the 1980s, she intensified her oppositional activities, contributing to the samizdat periodical Arka under the pseudonym "Stańczykówna", as well as to Kultura.

In the early 1990s, with a poem published in Gazeta Wyborcza, she supported the vote of no confidence in the first non-Communist government that brought former Communists back to power.

The last collection published while Szymborska was still alive, Dwukropek, was chosen as the best book of 2006 by readers of Poland's Gazeta Wyborcza.

In the Germanosphere, Szymborska is closely associated with Łódź-born literary translator Karl Dedecius, who did much to popularize postwar Polish literature there.

Surrounded by friends and relatives, Szymborska died peacefully of lung cancer in her sleep at home in Kraków in 2012, aged 88.

[19] Szymborska frequently employed literary devices such as ironic precision, paradox, contradiction, and understatement to illuminate philosophical themes and obsessions.