Tomas Tranströmer: Background information when reading The Half-Finished Heaven

Tomas Tranströmer

This article relates to The Half-Finished Heaven

Tomas Tranströmer was born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1931, and spent his career as a psychologist. The author of a dozen books of poetry, Tranströmer is the most renowned Scandinavian poet since World War II. His poetry has been translated into more than fifty languages. In 2011, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature "because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality." He has received numerous other honors, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Bonnier Award for Poetry, Germany's Petrach Prize, the Bellman Prize, the Swedish Academy's Nordic Prize, the August Prize, and a Special Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry. For more information, visit Tomas Tranströmer's bio page.

Click on the video below to learn more about Tranströmer's Nobel win and to hear audio recordings of him reading from his work throughout his career (the video opens in Swedish but is mostly in English).

Robert Bly

Robert Bly, who edited and translated this 2001 collection, was born in 1926 in Minnesota and lives in Minneapolis. He is the author of more than thirty works of poetry, including Eating the Honey of Words: New and Selected Poems and The Light around the Body, which received the National Book Award. As the editor of the influential publications The Fifties and The Sixties, Bly has introduced many American readers to important international poets, including Pablo Neruda, Tomas Tranströmer, Cesar Vallejo, and others.

Filed under Books and Authors

This article relates to The Half-Finished Heaven. It first ran in the November 17, 2011 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.