The prize citation likened her to the "Mozart of poetry," a woman who mixed elegance of language with "the fury of Beethoven" and who was not afraid to tackle serious subjects with humor.
Szymborska, 73, had gone for a walk in the southern Polish holiday resort of Zakopane just before the Swedish Academy announced the $1.12 million prize yesterday. When she came home, she found her life had changed.
"I am very happy, I am honored, but at the same time stunned and a little bit frightened with what awaits me," she told Poland's Radio Zet. "I'm afraid I will not have a quiet life for some time now, and this is what I prize the most."
She later told Polish television she was not like a movie star determined to "build a whole life" on her award.
Arguably Poland's most popular poet, Szymborska's work inspired the 1994 movie "Red" as well as providing lyrics for Polish rock stars. Critics say she is both deeply political and witty, and uses humor in delightful, unexpected ways.
Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, the dominant political figure in Yugoslavia, and Alija Izetbegovic, the newly elected Muslim chairman of Bosnia's tripartite presidency, met here privately yesterday for the first time since the war in the former Yugoslav republic broke out in April 1992.
The two Balkan presidents, once bitter adversaries, emerged from two private sessions and a long lunch with French President Jacques Chirac and international mediator Carl Bildt to say they would open embassies in each other's capitals in the near future. There was also a brief signing ceremony at the Elysee Palace, where Milosevic and Izetbegovic had signed the Dayton accord last December.
"The time of confrontation and conflicts should be replaced with a time of construction and prosperity," the two presidents said in a joint statement. "Yugoslavia and Bosnia will establish diplomatic relations on embassy level. Yugoslavia will accept the integrity of Bosnia."
The step, which followed diplomatic recognition in principle in August, helps to solidify a key agreement reached in last fall's U.S.-sponsored negotiations in Dayton, Ohio: that Milosevic's Serbian government support the existence of an independent, multiethnic Bosnia, and give no encouragement to Bosnian Serb nationalists' hopes of seceding and merging their half of Bosnia into Serbian-led Yugoslavia. The other half of Bosnia consists of a Muslim-Croat federation.