Biography Anna Swirszczynska

Poet Biography

Anna Swirszczynska (1909-1984) was an outstanding Polish poet and playwright. Until 1944 she lived in Warsaw where she witnessed the Ghetto Uprising in 1943 and was a nurse in a makeshift hospital during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. From 1945 she lived in Krakow.

Swirszczynska created her own form of poetry, her own way of talking about the world. She made her debut before the Second World War, but reached the peak of her artistic potential in the 1970s, in the poetry collections Jestem baba, (I'm a Woman, 1972); Budowalam barykade, (I Built a Barricade, 1974); and Szczesliwa jak psi ogon, (As Happy as a Dog's Tail, 1978).

These works are the best record in Polish poetry of female fate, of love, erotica, motherhood, old age, disease, rejection, desire, and longing. Swirszczynska gave these states and feelings a form as simple and as direct as possible, and thereby achieved immortality.