Authors Like Wisława Szymborska

Emily Dickinson

American · Poems (1890), The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1955)

Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830 and died there in 1886. She wrote nearly 1,800 poems but published only about ten in her lifetime; the first collection, in 1890, was heavily altered by its editors, and Thomas H. Johnson's 1955 edition brought the poems closer to her manuscripts. Her poems use short lines, slant rhyme and dashes.

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C. P. Cavafy

Greek · ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ (1904), ‘Ithaca’ (1911)

Cavafy was born in Alexandria in 1863 and worked for thirty years as a clerk in the British-run Egyptian Ministry of Public Works. He refused to publish a book, circulating his poems in newspapers and privately printed broadsheets; his first collection appeared in 1935, two years after his death. Many of his poems are set in the Hellenistic world, and some are about love between men.

Czesław Miłosz

Polish-American · Rescue (1945), The Captive Mind (1953)

Miłosz was born in 1911 in Šeteniai, now in Lithuania, and served as a cultural attaché for communist Poland until he left for Paris in 1951 and was granted asylum. The Captive Mind examines how intellectuals accommodated Stalinism. He taught at Berkeley from 1960, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980 and died in Kraków in 2004.

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Zbigniew Herbert

Polish · Chord of Light (1956), Mr Cogito (1974), Report from the Besieged City (1983)

Herbert was born in Lwów in 1924. Under Stalinism he refused to write political propaganda or follow socialist realism, and his first book did not appear until 1956. Report from the Besieged City was published in Paris in 1983. In 1994 he accused public figures, Miłosz among them, of responsibility for the country's difficulties, remarks that set off lasting polemics. He died in 1998.

Adam Zagajewski

Polish · Tremor (1987), Mysticism for Beginners (1999), Without End (2003)

Zagajewski was born in Lwów in 1945. After he signed the Letter of 59, the communist authorities banned his work. His poem ‘Try to Praise the Mutilated World’ appeared in The New Yorker shortly after the attacks of 11 September 2001, and he won the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature in 2017. He died in Kraków in 2021.

Tomas Tranströmer

Swedish · 17 Poems (1954), The Great Enigma (2004)

Tranströmer was born in Stockholm in 1931 and worked as a psychologist from 1960 to 1990. A stroke in 1990 left him partly paralysed and unable to speak, but he went on writing. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011 and died in 2015.

Louise Glück

American · The Wild Iris (1992), Averno (2006), Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014)

Glück was born in New York City in 1943. The Wild Iris won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 and Faithful and Virtuous Night the National Book Award in 2014. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2020 for ‘her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal’ and died in 2023.

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Mary Oliver

American · American Primitive (1983), Dream Work (1986), New and Selected Poems (1992)

Oliver was born in Maple Heights, Ohio, in 1935 and lived for decades in Provincetown, Massachusetts, with the photographer Molly Malone Cook. American Primitive won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 and New and Selected Poems the National Book Award in 1992. Critics often called her sentimental, and her popularity outran her critical reputation. She died in 2019.

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Kay Ryan

American · Say Uncle (2000), The Niagara River (2005), The Best of It (2010)

Ryan was born in San Jose, California, in 1945 and was US Poet Laureate from 2008 to 2010. The Best of It: New and Selected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2011. Her poems are compact and full of internal rhyme, and critics often compare her to Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore.

Sharon Olds

American · Satan Says (1980), The Father (1992), Stag's Leap (2012)

Olds was born in San Francisco in 1942 and taught at New York University. Her poems deal frankly with family, sex and the body; Stag's Leap, written after her divorce, won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize. In 2005 she declined Laura Bush's invitation to the National Book Festival in an open letter.

Every book by Sharon Olds →