October 6, 2011-- Graywolf Press is thrilled to announce that after many years of being considered a frontrunner, Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer has been awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature. In 2001, Graywolf published The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Tranströmer, chosen and translated by Robert Bly, to critical acclaim. The news was announced this morning in Stockholm.

The New York Times called the poems of Tomas Tranströmer “points of entry ‘upward into/the depths’ of an imagination, a spirit that is regeneratively inventive, capacious, unillusioned, undaunted, admirable.” Robert Bly, a longtime friend as well as one of Tranströmer’s first translators, carefully chose the very best of Tranströmer’s poems to make The Half-Finished Heaven a indispensible and necessary collection. In his introduction to the book, Bly wrote that “Tomas Tranströmer has a strange genius for the image; images rise seemingly without effort on his part. . . . His poems are a sort of railway station where trains that have come enormous distances stand briefly in the same building. One train may have some Russian snow on the undercarriage, and another may have Mediterranean flowers fresh in the compartments, and Ruhr soot on the roofs.”

Tomas Tranströmer was born and educated in Stockholm. He has written thirteen books of poems and is the recipient of such honors as the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Bonnier Award for Poetry, Germany’s Petrarch Prize, the Bellman Prize, and the Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize. His poetry has been translated into over sixty languages.

Robert Bly is a poet, translator, essayist, and editor of over fifty books, for which he has received many prizes. His most recent poetry collections include Talking into the Ear of a Donkey, Turkish Pears in August: Twenty-Four Ramages, The Urge to Travel Long Distances, and My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy, and The Dream We Carry: Selected and Last Poems of Olav H. Hauge, which he translated with Robert Hedin. Bly lives in Minneapolis.