IN a corner of north Northumberland where sheep outnumber people, they are celebrating their latest Nobel Prize winner.
The award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Tomas Tranströmer, one of Sweden’s most important poets, was another victory for Bloodaxe Books.
Tranströmer is the sixth Nobel Laureate on Bloodaxe’s extensive list of poetry in translation.
The publishing house set up by Neil Astley in 1978 relocated to Highgreen, Tarset, in 2000 but has been publishing the work of the Swedish poet for a quarter of a century.
Tranströmer doesn’t give interviews, having suffered a stroke in 1990 which badly affected his speech, but as a voice in literature he is evidently still supremely eloquent.
A statement from the Northumberland publisher read: “Bloodaxe Books has been publishing Tranströmer’s work for the past 25 years, starting with his Collected Poems in 1987, translated by Robin Fulton.
“Fulton’s prize-winning translation is the most authoritative and comprehensive edition of his poetry published anywhere in English.”
A revised and expanded edition, New Collected Poems, was published in April to mark the 80th birthday of the poet who was born and lives in Stockholm.
Controversy surrounds most Nobel Prize winners in Literature and, not surprisingly, there were mixed responses to the news from around the world.
Some critics implied that this was a case of the Swedes picking one of their own.
But you would hear few grumbles around Highgreen.
According to Neil Astley, Tranströmer’s poems, “often explorations of the borderland between sleep and waking, between the conscious and unconscious states”, are of enormous merit.
Tranströmer worked for much of his life as a psychologist, including at one period in a young offenders’ institution.
He is Bloodaxe’s sixth Nobel Laureate and their second Swedish one – the other being Harry Martinson whose book Chickweed Wintergreen: Selected Poems was published by Bloodaxe last year.
In 2010 Bloodaxe also published work by two more of its growing band of Nobel Prize winners, the Chilean Pablo Neruda, who won in 1971, and Rabindranath Tagore, a Bengali who became the first non-European Nobel Laureate with his win in 1913.
Both men have been dead for decades but Bloodaxe Books helps to keep their poetry and their memory alive in the English-speaking world.
