Selected Poems

Lars Gustafsson is one of Scandinavia's best-known authors. Born in Västerås, Sweden, in 1936, he published his first novel Vägvila: ett mysteriespel på prosa (Rest on the Way: A Mystery Play in Prose), at the age of 21. He is one of the most prolific Swedish writers since August Strindberg. Since the late 1950s he has produced a voluminous flow of poetry, novels, short stories, critical essays, and articles, gaining international recognition with literary awards such as the Prix International Charles Veillon des Essais in 1983, the Heinrich Steffens Preis in 1986, Una Vita per la Litteratura in 1989, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for poetry in 1994, as well as a Nobel nomination. His best-known novel - championed by John Updike - is The Death of a Beekeeper (1968). Previous English translations of his poetry published in the US include The Stillness of the World Before Bach (1988), Elegies and Other Poems (2000) from New Directions, and A Time in Xanadu (2008) from Copper Canyon. His Bloodaxe Selected Poems (2015) is his first UK poetry publication and is a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. From 1983 he served as a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where he taught Philosophy and Creative Writing, until retiring in 2006, and has held several visiting lectureships and residencies in Germany. He now divides his time between Stockholm and northern Västmanland, Sweden.