Nobel Prize Goes to Tomas Tranströmer, Swedish Poet Published by New Directions

Emily Witt — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 08:57:51 -0400

All kinds of rumors have been going around in New York publishing about who would win this year's Nobel prize for literature. Cormac McCarthy? Haruki Murakami? Philip Roth? In the end it went not to a novelist, but to a Swedish poet, Tomas Tranströmer.

It's a big win for independent publishing house New Directions, which published the new collected poems of Mr. Tranströmer in 2006, Graywolf Press, which published his "Best Poems" in 2001, and Ecco, which published another collected poems in 2000. In the Publishers Weekly review of the New Directions collection, which received a starred review, Mr. Tranströmer was described as "a perennial Nobel Prize candidate." Destiny fulfilled!

And this, from Poets.org:

He has read at many American universities, often with poet and friend Robert Bly. Tranströmer is a respected psychologist, and has worked at a juvenile prison, and with the disabled, convicts, and drug addicts. He lives with his wife Monica in Vasteras, west of Stockholm.

Observer » Nobel Prize Goes to Tomas Tranströmer, Swedish Poet Published by New Directions

Nobel Prize Goes to Tomas Tranströmer, Swedish Poet Published by New Directions