Identity area
Type of entity
Person
Authorized form of name
Forsström, Tua Birgitta, 1947-, poet and writer
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Standardized form(s) of name according to other rules
Other form(s) of name
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Description area
Dates of existence
1947-
History
Tua Forsström was born in 1947 in Borgå and divides her time between Ekenas and Helsinki. A much acclaimed Finland-Swedish poet, she has won major literary honours in Sweden as well as Finland. She published her first book in 1972, En dikt om kärleck och annat (A Poem About Love and Other Things), followed by Där anteckningarna slutar (Where the Notes End, 1974), Egentligen är vi mycket lyckliga (Actually We Are Very Happy, 1976), Tallört (Yellow Bird’s-nest, 1979), and September (September, 1983). Tua Forsström achieved wider recognition with her sixth collection, Snöleopard (Snow Leopard, 1987), notably in Sweden and in Britain, where David McDuff’s translation (Bloodaxe Books, 1990) received a Poetry Book Society Translation Award. Marianergraven (The Marianer Trench, 1990) was followed by Parkerna (The Parks, 1992), which won the Swedish Academy’s Finland Prize and was nominated for both the major Swedish literary award, the August Prize (rare for a Finland-Swedish writer) and for Finland’s major literary award, the Finland Prize (now given only for prose). Efter att ha tillbringat en natt bland hästar (After Spending a Night Among Horses) appeared in 1998. In 2003 she published her trilogy, Jag studerade en gång vid en underbar fakultat (I studied once at a wonderful faculty), whose English translation by David McDuff and Stina Katchadourian was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2006. This combines her three collections Snow Leopard, The Parks and After Spending a Night Among Horses with a new sequence, Minerals. Other awards given to Tua Forsström include the Edith Södergran Prize (1991), Pro-Finlandia Medal (1991), Göteborgs-Postens poetry prize (1992), Gerald Bonnier poetry prize (1993), Tollanderska Prize (1998) and Nordic Council Literature Prize (1998). Her poetry has been translated into several languages, including Finnish, Danish, Dutch, French, Spanish and English. Her breakthrough into the English-speaking world came in 1987 with her sixth collection, Snow Leopard (Snöleopard), which was translated into the English by David McDuff and published by Bloodaxe Books. In 1990 the book won a Poetry Book Society Translation Award in the United Kingdom.