Marta Kijowska
Nothing Happens Twice. Wisława Szymborska.

biography

320pp
€ 28,00   €[A] 28,80   
ISBN: 978-3-89561-193-3

An admired poet full of elegance, reserved and publicity-shy. A petite chain smoker with a passion for camping, Ella Fitzgerald, and Woody Allen; who blossomed in the company of friends and loved limericks and practical jokes. Who was Wisława Szymborska, who embodied these various facets and suddenly became famous when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996? In the first German portrait of the poet, Marta Kijowska embarks on the search for a woman who grew up on a country estate near Posen before moving to Krakow with her family. The biographer gradually reveals a century of dislocations – war, occupation, Communist rule, and the liberation movement known as Solidarnosc and describes how everything affected Szymborska’s work and relationships.
In Nothing Happens Twice, Marta Kijowska, the great authority on Polish literature, familiarizes us with a fascinating figure whose much-admired poems – playful and self-ironic, bitter and profoundly sad – touch us to this day.

Reviews

»By not speculating, by telling but not revealing, Marta Kijowska has succeeded in creating a poem in the style of Wisława Szymborska that has crystallised into a description of her life.«
Christiane Pöhlmann, FAZ

»For me, Szymborska is above all a poet of consciousness. That means she speaks to us as one of us while keeping her private affairs to herself«
Czewlaw Milosz