Nobel Prize-winning poet Wisława Szymborska died Wednesday at home in Kraków, Poland.

The 88-year-old poet had been afflicted with lung cancer. Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski said on Twitter that her death was an “irreparable loss to Poland’s culture.”

When Szymborska was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1996, the committee cited her “for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality.”

Szymborska published her first book of poetry in 1952. Her work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. “I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems,” she once said.

In 1996, after the Nobel announcement, the Times’ Warsaw bureau chief, Dean E. Murphy, spoke to Szymborska — “a retiring woman with wispy gray hair who cherishes her solitude” — about her work. “The award came as a surprise to Szymborska, and most everyone else in Poland, not because she is considered unworthy, but because her poetry speaks mostly to universal themes rather than the parochial political subjects that have distinguished Eastern European verse since World War II,” he wrote.

“In her poems we could find brilliant advice which made the world easier to understand” – the presidential couple added.

Last year, President Bronisław Komorowski honoured Wisława Szymborska with Poland’s highest distinction, The Order of the White Eagle, in recognition of her contribution to her country’s culture.

Do następnego razu… (Till next time…)