Juris Kronbergs

Juris Kronbergs is a poet and translator. He was born in Sweden in 1946, to a family of Latvian artists. He studied Literature, Science, Nordic and Baltic languages at the University of Stockholm, and the Theory of Translation and 20th-century Poery at the University of 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 the Swedish parliament, government and the Nordic Council of Ministers.

Juris served as a diplomat for ten years, Cultural Attaché at the Latvian Embassy in Sweden (1992-2002). He 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, and several scholarships and prizes for poetry and translation, including the prize for best poetry collection of the year in Latvia for his collections Wolf One-Eye (1997) and On the Balcony (2017).

Sixteen collections of his poetry have been published, as well as poetry on CD (in Latvia and in Sweden). His output includes sixty books of translations, mostly Latvian poetry (but also prose) into Swedish, and Swedish literature into Latvian. His poetry have been translated into many languages: English, Swedish, German, French, Italian, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic, Finnish, Estonian, Lithuanian, Chec, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Armenian, Greek, Slovenian, Catalan, Irish, Welsh, Chinese, Korean. In 2006, the British publisher ARC published a volume of the complete Wolf One-Eye collection in English (translated by Mara Rozitis).