Tomas Tranströmer

Born on April 15, 1931, in Stockholm, Sweden, Tomas Gösta Tranströmer was raised by his mother, a schoolteacher, after his parents’ early divorce. He grew up in a working-class neighborhood of the Swedish capital, developing from childhood a deep sensitivity to landscape, weather, and the submarine strangeness of ordinary experience. He studied psychology, literature, and the history of religion at Stockholm University, graduating in 1956, and worked for decades as a psychologist at the Roxtuna center for juvenile offenders, a vocation he pursued quietly alongside his poetry. His first collection, 17 dikter (17 Poems, 1954), published when he was twenty-three, announced a voice of startling compression and metaphoric intensity , poems in which a frozen Baltic bay could become a parable of consciousness and a piano practice room could open into eternity. He published sparingly, averaging one slim volume per decade: Hemligheter på vägen (Secrets on the Way, 1958), Klanger och spår (Resonance and Tracks, 1966), Österjöar (Baltics, 1974), Det vilda torget (The Wild Marketplace, 1983), and Sörgegondolen (The Sorrow Gondola, 1996). His total output amounts to barely more than two hundred poems, yet they have been translated into over sixty languages , a testament to the uncanny universality of his imagery. In 1990 he suffered a severe stroke that left him partially paralyzed and unable to speak, yet he continued to write, composing with his left hand. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011, the Swedish Academy praising his “condensed, translucent images” that gave “us fresh access to reality.” He died on March 26, 2015, in Stockholm.

As a boy summering on the island of Runmarö in the Stockholm archipelago, Tranströmer roamed the shore collecting and mounting beetles with a naturalist's patience. He later wrote that he had learned the ground was alive, an infinite world of creeping and flying things living their own rich life. That attention never left his poems.