Tomas Tranströmer

Tomas Tranströmer was born in Stockholm in 1931 and raised by his mother, a schoolteacher, after his parents divorced. He began writing poetry at the Södra Latin school, and his first collection, 17 Poems, appeared in 1954, when he was twenty-three. He trained as a psychologist at Stockholm University and kept that profession for most of his working life, first at an institution for young offenders and then, for twenty-five years, at a labour-market institute in Västerås.

His output was small and exact: some fifteen books across six decades. A typical poem turns on a single image that shifts scale without warning — a commuter train, a winter forest, a sudden memory — so that the everyday opens onto something larger and uncertain. Swedish landscapes and seasons, the Baltic coast and music recur, and many readers have sensed a religious undertow, though the poems never resolve into doctrine. His long correspondence and friendship with the American poet Robert Bly, who translated him, helped carry his work abroad, and it has since appeared in more than sixty languages, with a reputation for surviving translation unusually well.

A stroke in 1990 left him partly paralysed and largely unable to speak. He went on writing in ever more condensed forms, including the haiku of The Great Enigma (2004), and taught himself to play the piano with his left hand. The Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in 2011 for images that give fresh access to reality — the first Swedish laureate since 1974. He died in Stockholm in March 2015, at eighty-three.