Tomas Tranströmer (1931-2015) was awarded the Nobel Prize in
Literature in 2011. He was born in Stockholm, where he grew up, but
spent many long summers on the island of Runmarö in the nearby
archipelago, evoking that landscape in his early work, which draws
on the aesthetic tradition of Swedish nature poetry. His later
poetry is more personal, open and relaxed, often reflecting his
broad interests: travel, music, painting, archaeology and natural
sciences.
Tranströmer started writing poetry while at the oppressive Södra
Latin Grammar School (its atmosphere caught by Ingmar Bergman in
Alf Sjöberg’s Frenzy, which was filmed there, the young Tomas
amongst the pupils). But he was devouring books on all subjects,
especially geography, with daily visits to the local library, where
he worked his way through most of the non-fiction shelves. However,
this bookish adolescence was shadowed by the war, by his parents’
divorce and the absence of his father, and at 15 he experienced a
winter of psychological crisis. He published his first collection,
17 Poems, in 1954, at the age of 23.
After studying psychology at the University of Stockholm, he worked
at its Psychotechnological Institute, and in 1960 became a
psychologist at Roxtuna, a young offenders institution. From the
mid-1960s he divided his time between his writing and his work as a
psychologist, and in 1965 moved with his family to Västerås, where
he spent the rest of his working life. In 1990, a year after the
publication of his tenth book of poems, Tranströmer suffered a
stroke, which deprived him of most of his speech and partly
inhibited movement on his right-hand side. Swedish composers have
since written several left-hand piano pieces especially for him to
play.
After his stroke, he published a short book of 'autobiographical
chapters', Memories Look at Me (1993) and a new collection, The Sad
Gondola (1996), both included in Robin Fulton’s translation of his
Bloodaxe New Collected Poems (1997). In 2004 he published The Great
Enigma, a slim volume containing five short poems and a group of 45
even smaller haiku-type poems. These were added to the New
Collected Poems to form Tranströmer’s first collected edition to
appear in the States, licensed by Bloodaxe Books to New Directions
in 2006 under the title The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems. That
edition was published by Bloodaxe Books in the UK as the latest
revised and expanded edition of New Collected Poems in 2010.
Tranströmer also translated other poets into Swedish, including
Robert Bly and Hungary’s János Pilinszky. Before winning the Nobel
Prize in Literature in 2011, he had won many other international
awards for his poetry, including the Neustadt International Prize
for Literature in the US, the Bonner Award for Poetry, Germany’s
Petrarch Prize, the Bellman Prize, the Swedish Academy’s Nordic
Prize, and the August Prize. In 1997 the city of Västerås
established a special Tranströmer Prize. In 2007, he received a
special Lifetime Recognition Award given by the trustees of the
Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry, which also awards the
annual Griffin Poetry Prize.
His correspondence with Robert Bly was published in Sweden in 2001,
and in 2013 an English translation, Airmail: The Letters of Robert
Bly and Tomas Tranströmer, was published by Bloodaxe Books in the
UK and by Graywolf Press in the US.
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