The Star By My Head: Poets From Sweden

Editors and translators Malena Mörling and Jonas Ellerström will read in English and Swedish from The Star By My Head: Poets from Sweden. The reading will be followed by a conversation about the book, the art of translation, and modern Swedish poetry and publishing.  

With poems that span from the beginnings of Modernism to present day, The Star By My Head is a premiere American anthology of 20th and 21st-century Swedish poetry in English translation. About the collection, which was published as part of the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute's Poets in the World series, Ilya Kaminsky says, "Swedes, more than any other twentieth-century poetic tradition, were able to find a lyric and transcendent moment that gives their poems grace without large proclamations, without yelling on rooftops, without super-ego movements. Swedes prove to us over and over that even in the midst of this most barbarous century, it was still possible to find moments of wonder."

Jonas Ellerström is a distinguished Swedish writer, translator, publisher, and critic. He has published poetry and essay collections in Swedish and is an acclaimed translator of William Blake, Arthur Rimbaud,  and T.S. Eliot. He lives in Stockholm.

Malena Mörling is the author of Ocean Avenue and Astoria and is one of Tomas Tranströmer's most acclaimed translators into English. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and Rona Jaffe Award. She is on the faculty of the MFA programs at New England College and the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.

Presented with Milkweed Editions, the Swedish American Museum, and the Swedish Arts Council

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