The Blue House

About the Author

Nobel Laureate Tomas Tranströmer was born in Stockholm in 1931, and studied literature and psychology at the University of Stockholm. A poet and psychologist who worked with disadvantaged youth, Tranströmer authored numerous full length poetry collections translated into more than fifty languages. He died in Stockholm in 2015.

Patty Crane is a translator and poet from Cape Cod. Her translations of Tomas Tranströmer have appeared in The New York Times, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Her first book-length Tranströmer translation, Bright Scythe, was published by Sarabande Books (2015).  Crane spent three years living in Sweden to work with Tranströmer and his wife, Monica, to translate and study his work, and, in 2019 received a MacDowell fellowship to continue translating Tranströmer’s poetry. She currently splits her time between Massachusetts and Vermont.