Translated from the Swedish by Malena Mörling with a postscript by Jonas Ellerström.

ABOUT THE BOOK

WINNER OF THE 2011 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

Tomas Tranströmer worked for several years as a psychologist for juvenile delinquents. In 1959 he visited his colleague Åke Nordin, who was also a poet, at the Hällby youth prison in the southern part of Sweden. Later that year he sent Nordin a sequence of nine haiku, giving his impressions of the prison milieu. These poems were rediscovered in 2001 and are presented here in a bilingual edition. 

26 copies have been hand-bound into cloth-covered boards. See Special Editions page for ordering information.

"Tomas Tranströmer leaves an indelible mark upon readers everywhere. The gifts of his poems are offered generously and without conditions. I cannot think of another poet who has left more lasting impressions -impressions which never cease, but instead keep creating new spheres of realities and imaginations. He is constantly a poet of nearness" 

—Michael Burkard

ABOUT TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER

Tomas Tranströmer, winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature, was one of the most celebrated and influential poetic figures of his generation. He was born in Stockholm in 1931 and educated at the Södra Latin School and the University of Stockholm, where he received a degree in psychology. He began his psychology career in the early 1960s at Roxtuna, a juvenile corrections institute in Sweden, and worked for several decades in the field. Since the publication of 17 Dikter (17 Poems) in 1954, Tranströmer wrote eleven full-length collections of poetry, most recently Den stora gåtan (The Great Enigma) in 2004. He was one of the world's most translated poets (with books appearing in numerous editions in over fifty languages). In addition to his renown as a poet, Tranströmer was also a highly regarded concert pianist and entomologist. He died in Stockholm in 2015.

32 pages | hand-sewn chapbook | 5.5 x 7.5 in.
ISBN-13: 978-1-935635-18-5