Jesper Svenbro is one Sweden’s most read and respected contemporary poets and a classical scholar. In 2006, he was elected a member of the Swedish Academy. Born in 1944 in the small town of Landskrona in the province of Skåne, southern Sweden, he studied classics at Lund University, where his doctoral dissertation was entitled La parole et le marbre: aux origines de la poétique grecque [The word and marble: on the origin of Greek poetics]. He studied Greek with Eric Havelock at Yale, has lived in Italy, and now lives in Thorigny-sur-Marne outside Paris, where for many years he been director of research at the Centre Louis Gernet, which is part of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. His scholarly works include Phrasikleia: anthropologie de la lecture en Grèce ancienne (English transl. 1993: Phrasikleia: An Anthropology of Reading in Ancient Greece), and many essays in French, Swedish and English. His eleven poetry collections span forty years, from Det är i dag det sker [It Happens Today], 1966, to his latest volume, Vingårdsmannen och hans söner [The Vine-dresser and his sons], 2008. His poetry has been translated into French, German, Italian and English. The selection Three-toed gull, translated by John Matthias and Lars-Håkan Svensson, appeared in 2003. His awards include the Swedish Radio Company’s poetry prize, 1993; the Bellman Prize, 2000; the Ekelöf Prize, 2001l and the Övralid Prize, 2005. | 
