Papusza received the Gorzów Award in 1978, part of a series of honors recognizing her literary legacy late in her life.
Completing the trio of honors bestowed upon her in 1978, Papusza received the Gorzów Award, a cultural prize associated with the Gorzów Wielkopolski region of western Poland. This award, together with the Minister of Culture Award and the Nadodrza Cultural Award received the same year, marked a concentrated period of formal recognition for her pioneering contributions to Polish and Roma literature.
By 1978, Papusza had lived for over two decades with the consequences of her controversial rise to literary fame in the early 1950s — including estrangement from much of the Roma community, episodes of mental illness, and periods of institutionalization in psychiatric care. That she continued to receive cultural honors during this period speaks to the enduring recognition of her literary achievement within Polish cultural institutions, even as her personal life remained marked by isolation and hardship.
Although the exact date of the Gorzów Award ceremony is not verified in available sources, its presentation in 1978 situates it within a significant late-life period of formal acknowledgment for a woman whose groundbreaking work as the first published Romani poet in Poland had, by then, become an established part of Polish literary history, paving the way for future generations of Roma writers and for greater scholarly attention to Roma culture and the Roma Holocaust.