Kronbergs Juris / Latvia / Sweden

About Juris Kronbergs Juris Kronbergs is a poet and translator. He was born in Sweden in 1946, in a Latvian artist family. He studied Literature Science, Nordic and Baltic languages at the University of Stockholm, as well as Theory of Translation and 20th Century poetry at Cambridge, England. At the end of the 1980s and the beginning of 1990s he worked as a radio journalist for Radio Sweden, and as an interpreter for Sweden’s parliament, government and The Nordic Council of Ministers. For ten years he served as a diplomat – Cultural Attaché at the Latvian Embassy in Sweden (1992-2002). He is has been a guest lecturer at the University of Stockholm, University of Uppsala, several Swedish University Colleges, as well as Stanford University (USA), University of Toronto and the Foreign Service Institute (Washington DC). He has been the President of the Latvian P.E.N. centre, he is an honorary member of the Latvian Academy of Sciences, a recipient of the Latvian Three Star order, the Swedish North Star order, several scholarships and prizes for poetry and translation, among them the prize for best poetry collection of the year in Latvia (1997) for the collection Wolf One-Eye. Twelve collections of his poetry have been published, as well as poetry on CD (in Latvia and in Sweden). His output includes forty-five books of translations, mostly Latvian poetry (but also prose) into Swedish, and Swedish literature into Latvian. His poems have been translated into many languages: English, German, French, Italian, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic, Finnish, Estonian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Armenian, Greek, Slovenian, Catalan, Irish, Welsh, Chinese. In November 2006, the British publisher ARC published a volume with the complete Wolf One-Eye collection in English (translated by Mara Rozitis). In 2007 a broad selection of his poems were published in Estonia, books with his poetry in translation have been published in Lithuania (2008), Armenia (2008), France (January 2010) and Denmark (2011). He has participated in Poetry readings in many European countries, USA, Canada and Australia.