The Great Enigma

Tomas Tranströmer was born in Stockholm, Sweden on April 15, 1931. He was 23 years old when his debut work, Seventeen Poems, was published in 1954. He graduated from Stockholm University in 1956 and became a psychologist. He worked in state institutions with juvenile offenders, parole violators, and the disabled. He wrote more than 15 books during his lifetime including The Sorrow Gondola, The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Tranströmer, Airmail: The Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer, Memories Look at Me, The Deleted World, and The Great Enigma: New and Collected Poems. He won numerous awards including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Oevralids Prize, the Swedish Award from International Poetry Forum, the Lifetime Recognition Award given by the trustees of the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry in 2007, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2011. He died on March 26, 2015 at the age of 83.

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