        Tomas Tranströmer (born April 15, 1931) is a Swedish poet, psychologist, and translator who has occupied an influential position in Swedish literature since the 1950s. In the English-speaking world, Transtromer is the best-known modern Scandinavian poet. His work has been translated into fifty languages, including Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Spanish and English, and his poetry has been deeply influential in Sweden, as well as around the world.
        Tomas Tranströmer was born in Stockholm. His father was a journalist, but after his parents divorced he rarely saw his father. Tranströmer's mother was a teacher. During childhood Tranströmer spent many summers on the island of Runmarö, and in his poetry collection Östersjöar (1974, Baltics) and memoir Minnena ser mig (1993) he also returned to its landscape. Before Tranströmer became interested in music and painting, he was fascinated by archaeology and natural sciences and wanted to become an explorer. Tranströmer was educated at Södra Latin School, where he started to read and write poetry. In 1956 he received a degree in psychology from the University of Stockholm and began his career for the Psychotechnological Institute at the university, and in 1960 he became a psychologist at Roxtuna, an institution for juvenile offenders. From the mid-1960s Tranströmer divided his time between writing and his work as a psychologist. In 1965 he moved with his family to Västerås, a city about sixty miles west of Stockholm. From 1980 he was a psychologist for Arbetsmarknadsinstitutet, a labor organization institute, and after moving back to Stockholm with his wife Monica, he retired to write full-time.
       Tranströmer made his poetic debut at the age of twenty-three with 17 dikter (Seventeen Poems, 1954). This first volume included poems written in blank verse, and although later he experimented with metre, he has used free verse in most of his his work throughout his career. Hemligheter på vägen (1958) and Klangar och spår (1966) took up themes from Tranströmer's travels in different parts of the world - the Balkans, Spain, Africa, and the United States. The latter work also included a portrait of the composer Edward Grieg. In 'Izmir klockan tre' (from Hemligheter på vägen) a beggar carries another without legs on his back, and in 'Oklahoma' (from Klanger och spår) the passing cars in dark, with their lights on, turn into flying saucers. 'A Man from Benin' referred to an art work which Tranströmer saw at the Museum für Völkerkunde in Vienna. He published a short autobiography, Minnena ser mig (Memories are Watching Me), in 1993. Tranströmer and the American poet Robert Bly have been very close friends since the 1950s and their correspondence has been published in Swedish in the book Air Mail by Bonniers, his Swedish publishing company, to celebrate the poet's 70-year birthday His latest collection, Den stora gåtan (The Great Enigma), was published in 2004, and an English translation of his entire body of work, The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems, was published in 2006.
         In 1990, Tranströmer suffered a stroke that paralyzed the right side of his body and affects his speech, but he has continued to write. An accomplished pianist before the stroke, Tranströmer trained himself to play piano with left hand and has performed concerts and recored a CD of compositions for left hand. He has often been mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and many consider him one of Sweden's foremost poets. Tranströmer's awards include the Bonnier Award for Poetry, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Oevralids Prize, the Petrach Prize in Germany, and the Swedish Award from International Poetry Forum. In 2007, Tranströmer received a special Lifetime Recognition Award given by the trustees of the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry, which also awards the annual Griffin Poetry Prize. His poetry has been translated into fifty languages, including English by Bly, Robin Fulton, the prominent American blues writer Samuel Charters and May Swenson.

Bibliography

Swedish

17 dikter (1954)
Hemligheter på vägen (1958)
Den halvfärdiga himlen (1962)
Klanger och spår (1966)
Mörkerseende (1970)
Stigar (1973)
Östersjöar (1974)
Sanningsbarriären (1978)
Det vilda torget (1983)
För levande och döda (1989)
Sorgegondolen (1996)
Den stora gåtan (2004)

English

Seventeen Poems
The Half-Finished Heaven
Twenty Poems of Tomas Tranströmer, 1970
Windows and Stones
Friends, You Drank Some Darkness: Three Swedish Poets - Harry Martinson, Gunnar Ekelöf, Tomas Tranströmer, 1975 (trans. by Robert Bly)
Night Vision
Paths
Baltics
For the Living and the Dead
The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems (2006)
(trans. by Robin Fulton)