Tua Forsstroem was born in 1947 in Borga and currently lives in Helsinki. A much acclaimed Finland-Swedish poet, she has won major literary honours in Sweden as well as Finland. She published her first book in 1972, En dikt om karleck och annat (A Poem About Love and Other Things), followed by Dar anteckningarna slutar (Where the Notes End, 1974), Egentligen ar vi mycket lyckliga (Actually We Are Very Happy, 1976), Talloert (Yellow Bird's-nest, 1979), and September (September, 1983). Tua Forsstroem achieved wider recognition with her sixth collection, Snoeleopard (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 hastar (After Spending a Night Among Horses) appeared in 1998. In 2003 she published her trilogy, Jag studerade en gang 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 two further collections, En kvall i oktober rodde jag ut pa sjoen (2012), published in a bilingual edition with David McDuff's English translation as One Evening in October I Rowed Out on the Lake (Bloodaxe Books, 2015), and Anteckningar [Notes] (2018). Other awards given to Tua Forsstroem include the Edith Soedergran Prize (1991), Pro-Finlandia Medal (1991), Goeteborgs-Postens poetry prize (1992), Gerald Bonnier poetry prize (1993), Tollanderska Prize (1998) and Nordic Council Literature Prize (1998). Her poetry has been translated into several languages, including Finnish, Danish, Dutch, French, Spanish and English.
