Tua Forsström was born in 1947 in Borgå and currently lives in Helsinki. A much acclaimed Finland-Swedish poet, she has won major literary honours in Sweden as well as Finland. In 2019 she was elected a member of the Swedish Academy. She published her first book in 1972, En dikt om kärleck och annat (A Poem About Love and Other Things), followed by Där anteckningarna slutar (Where the Notes End, 1974), Egentligen är vi mycket lyckliga (Actually We Are Very Happy, 1976), Tallört (Yellow Bird’s-nest, 1979), and September (September, 1983). Tua Forsström achieved wider recognition with her sixth collection, Snöleopard (Snow Leopard, 1987), notably in Sweden and in Britain, where David McDuff’s translation (Bloodaxe Books, 1990) received a Poetry Book Society Translation Award. Marianergraven (The Marianer Trench, 1990) was followed by Parkerna (The Parks, 1992), which won the Swedish Academy’s Finland Prize and was nominated for both the major Swedish literary award, the August Prize (rare for a Finland-Swedish writer) and for Finland’s major literary award, the Finland Prize (now given only for prose). Efter att ha tillbringat en natt bland hästar (After Spending a Night Among Horses) appeared in 1997, for which she was awarded the Nordic Council Literature Prize (1998). She won the Swedish Academy’s Bellman Prize in 2003 and 2018. In 2003 she published her trilogy, Jag studerade en gång vid en underbar fakultat (I studied once at a wonderful faculty), whose English translation by David McDuff and Stina Katchadourian was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2006. This combines her three collections Snow Leopard, The Parks and After Spending a Night Among Horses with a new sequence, Minerals. She has since published three further collections, Sånger (Songs, 2006); En kväll i oktober rodde jag ut på sjön (2012), published in a dual language edition with David McDuff’s translation as One Evening in October I Rowed Out on the Lake (Bloodaxe Books, 2015); and Anteckningar (2018), published in a dual language edition with David McDuff's translation as I walked on into the forest: poems for a little girl (Bloodaxe Books, 2021). Other awards given to Tua Forsström include the Edith Södergran Prize (1991), Pro Finlandia Medal (1991), Göteborgs-Postens poetry prize (1992), Gerald Bonnier poetry prize (1993), Tollanderska Prize (1998) and Naim Frashëri Award (2012). She has also been nominated for the European Aristeion Prize. Her poetry has been translated into several languages, including Albanian, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Norwegian, Serbian and Spanish.
David McDuff was born in 1945, and attended the University of Edinburgh, where he studied Russian and German. After living for some time in the Soviet Union, Denmark, Iceland, and the United States, he eventually settled in the UK, where he worked for several years as a co-editor and reviewer on the literary magazine Stand. He then moved to London, where he began his career as a literary translator. McDuff's translations include both poetry and prose, including poems by Joseph Brodsky and Tomas Venclova, and novels including Karin Boye's Kallocain and Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Idiot (all four in Penguin Classics). He has published several translations with Bloodaxe, including books by Irina Ratushinskaya and Marina Tsvetaeva (from the Russian), Pia Tafdrup (Danish), Karin Boye and Edith Södergran (Swedish), and Gösta Ågren, Tua Forsström and Mirjam Tuominen (Finland Swedish), as well as the anthology Ice Around Our Lips: Finland-Swedish Poetry (1989). His translation of the Finnish-language author Tuomas Kyrö’s 2011 novel The Beggar and the Hare was published by Short Books in 2015. His literary awards include the 1994 TLS/George Bernard Shaw Translation Prize for his translation of Gösta Ågren's poems, A Valley in the Midst of Violence, published by Bloodaxe, and the 2006 Stora Pris of the Finland-Swedish Writers' Association (Finlands svenska författareförening), Helsinki. He was honoured with the Finnish State Award for Foreign Translators in 2013, and the Swedish Academy's Interpretation Prize 2021. From 2007 to 2010, he worked as an editor and translator with Prague Watchdog, the Prague-based NGO which monitored and discussed human rights abuses in Chechnya and the North Caucasus.
