When Wislawa Szymborksa's View with a Grain of Sand, also translated by Stanislaw Baraczak and Clare Cavanagh, was published shortly after its author's award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996, the Polish poet, hitherto all but unknown outside her own country, became an international name.

Wislawa Szymborska was born in Bnin, Poland, in 1923, and has lived in Krakow since 1931. She studied at Krakow University and worked at Zycie Literackie, the literary journal, as poetry editor and columnist from 1950 to 1981. She has published many collections of poetry, and has been awarded the Goethe Prize (1991), the Herder Prize (1995), the Polish PEN prize (1996) and the Nobel Prize for Literature (1996). View with a Grain of Sand (1996) and Poems, New and Collected (1999) are both published by Faber.