SONJA ÅKESSON (1926-1977) was, according to Heidi von Born, a very Swedish poet who gave us not only the very beautiful, grim, tender texts about the real Swedish landscape but also everyday reports about life in Sweden using everyday language in poetic form.

OVE ALLANSSON (1932- ) worked for two decades as industrial worker, seaman, mechanic, before his debut in 1967. He has published thirty books of fiction, travelogues, and documentaries. He has received many awards and citations. His 1971 novel Ombordarna (The Passengers) deals with the gullibility that paved the way for Nazism.

SISSELA BOK is a writer and philosopher born in Sweden. Formerly a Professor at Brandeis University, she is now a Distinguished Fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. Her books include: Lying: Moral Choice in Private and Public Life; Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation; A Strategy for Peace: Human Values and the Threat of War; Alva Myrdal: A Daughter's Memoir.

HEIDI VON BORN was born in Stockholm and has published twenty-seven books: novels, a short story collection, a few poetry collections and a children's book. She is also a critic and has written drama for radio and television, translated poetry by Margaret Atwood and others.

SUSAN BRANTLY is professor of Scandinavian Literature at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, specializing in Swedish.

EVA CLAESON was one of the starters of Metamorphoses eight years ago, and co-edited it for two years. She has published several books of translations as well as material in various translation journals. She is working on a classic novel at this time which will be published by the Scandinavian Department of the University of Wisconsin, and is the editor for this special Swedish issue.

MARGARETA EKSTRÖM (1930- ) is a Swedish writer who since her debut in 1960 has been known and admired especially for her many short story and poetry collections, as well as her translations of Virginia Woolf and others.

GUSTAF FRÖDING (1860-1911) struggled nearly all of his life with alcoholism and mental illness. Nevertheless he ranks among the most gifted of Swedish poets. His earlier work is remarkable for a quality of (bitter)-sweetness present, for instance in Vennerboom the Poet, a self-portrait in which Fröding sees clearly what a disastrous wreck he has become, yet lightens the effect with gentle humor. Throughout his work the stylistic brilliance shines through and the thematic obsessions born of his difficult life lend a distinctively "modern" flavor to his work.

HARALD GASKI (1955- ) is professor in Sami Literature at the University of Tromsoe, and the author and editor of several books and articles on Sami literature and culture. He has been a visiting scholar at several universities in the US, Australia and on Greenland.

TOM GEDDES formerly head of the Germanic Collections at the British Library, is now translator of novels and biographies from Swedish and Norwegian. Recent works include Nicolai Gedda: My Life and Art, Lars Gustafsson: The Tale of a Dog, Björn Larsson: Long John Silver. His translation of Lindgren's Way of a Serpent won the inaugural Bernard Shaw Translation Prize.

CARINA KARLSSON (1966- ) was born and lives in Aland, an island in the Baltic Sea and works in a grocery store. She has written since childhood, has been published in the local press as well as in magazines including BLM (Bonnier's Literary Magazine) and has received various grants. Lisbeta, Per Skarp's Wife was published in 1996.

STEPHEN KLASS is a professor of English at Adelphi University, Garden City, NY, and the translator of Fredrik Paludan-Müller's Danish satirical epic, Adam Homo (NY: Twickenham, 1981) and, in collaboration with Leif Sjöberg, Harry Martinsson's Aniara (Story Line Press, 1999).

OLOF LAGERCRANTZ (1911- ) is one of Sweden's foremost writers, he is a poet, biographer and critic as well as a political columnist and past editor of Dagens Nyheter, Sweden's largest daily paper. He has offered vivid, memorable treatments of Dante, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Proust, Strindberg as well as of his friend Gunnar Ekelöf, perhaps Sweden's finest poet.

RIKA LESSER (1953- ) is a poet and translator of Swedish and German literature and has taught literary translation at Columbia University and Yale University. She is the author of three collections of poetry and is celebrated for her translations of poetry. She has won many prizes and awards.

SARA LIDMAN (1923- ) is a novelist and essayist whose fame rests primarily on a series of five novels dealing with the bringing of the railroad to Lappland, written between 1977 and 1985 and generally referred to as Jernbane serien (Cranewater Chronicle) which is presently being revised by the translators. During the 90's she added two further novels to the series. She has received numerous very important prizes and was given the title of Honorary Professor in 1999.

TORGNY LINDGREN (1938- ) had his first book published in 1965, became a full-time writer in 1974 and has been a member of the Swedish Academy since 1991. His work includes two volumes of poetry, four volumes of short stories (one collection published in English under the title Merab's Beauty), and nine novels, four of which have been translated into English: The Way of the Serpent, Bathsheba, Light, and In Praise of Truth.

HARRY MARTINSSON (1904-1978) was one of the two Nobel Prize laureates in literature in 1974. After three decades as a poet and prose writer of exceptional claims upon the imagination and affections of his Swedish readership, he published in 1956 his 103-poem sequence Aniara. It was published, in a revised edition in 1999 by Story Line Press, Ashland, Oregon.

VERNE MOBERG is a lecturer in Scandinavian languages in the Swedish program at Columbia University. She has worked as a translator and editor in book publishing in New York and Stockholm, and has taught and written about women's literature.

JUDITH MOFFETT is the author of nine books in five genres including poetry and Swedish translation. She was awarded the Swedish Academy's Translation Prize in 1983. Her translations in this issue will appear in her tenth book, an anthology to be called The North! To the North! Five Poets of Nineteenth Century Sweden, forthcoming from Southern Illinois University Press.

THALIA PANDIRI is Editor-in-Chief of Metamorphoses and teaches Comparative Literature and Classics at Smith College.

VIKTOR RYDBERG (1826-1895) poet, novelist of ideas, biblical historian, political and drama critic, journalist, lecturer was the central literary figure of his age. His story is a rather sad one; he was orphaned very young; he was a homosexual in a time when homosexual activity was considered criminal; he longed all his life to be a child again in his mother's embrace. These feelings affected all his work profoundly; The Wood Siren, for example, dramatizes the dire consequences of being possessed by an unnatural love, as does his most popular novel Singoalla. Prolific and enormously influential in his own time he was a member of the Swedish Academy.

SOLVEIG VON SCHOULTZ (1907-1996) Belonged to the small minority of Swedish speaking families in Finland. In 1995 she told a reporter: "I am looking for the immediate expression that simultaneously is ambiguous and nuanced, a sorting out of all things unnecessary and loose...to find a language that is identical with what I want to say..." She wrote sixteen collections of poetry, eight collections of short stories, two novels, a biography of her mother and drama for the stage, radio and television. The poems included here are from a collection published the year she died, at the age of 90.

GEORGE SCHOOLFIELD is Professor Emeritus of German and Scandinavian Literatures at Yale University.

LEIF SJÖBERG (1925- ) was formerly Professor of Scandinavian Studies and Comparative Literatures at SUNY Stony Brook. He has translated Gunnar Ekelöf (with W.H. Auden), Tranströmer (with May Swenson) and many other Swedish poets. Aniara, an epic Science Fiction Poem (with Stephen Klass) was published by Story Line Press in 1999. He was interviewed by Eva Claeson in Metamorphoses, vol.1, No.2.

GÖRAN SONNEVI (1939- ) has published fourteen individual books of poems in addition to three collections, and he has translated the poetry of Ezra Pound, Paul Celan, Osip Mandelstam, and others into Swedish. He has won numerous awards and has received a life-time grant from the Swedish government, bestowed on 125 artists in honor of their contributions to the nation's culture. The first full book-length selection of his poetry in English was published in 1993 under the title A Child is Not a Knife: Selected Poems of Göran Sonnevi, edited and translated by Rika Lesser.

BRITA STENDAHL (1925- ) was born and educated in Sweden. She has written biographies in English of the Danish philosopher Sören Kierkegaard and of the Swedish 19th Century author Fredrika Bremer, she has translated poems by the Swedish 20th century poet Gunnar Ekelöf and others, has taught and lectured (among other things) on Scandinavian literature and history and together with Krister Stendahl on the subject of Humor and Religion (1991).

ESAIAS TEGNÉR (1782-1846) one of the great Swedish romantic poets was Professor of Classics at Lund, the author of the wildly popular cycle of poems Frithiofs Saga, and later as Bishop of Växjö, Tegnér seemed to fulfill all his early promises. But in 1825 a romantic entanglement led to a breakdown and crushing depression from which he never fully recovered. He wrote a few good poems afterwards, but his reputation as a fine stylist and humorist is based on work completed before 1825.

ROLAND THORSTENSSON is professor of Scandinavian Studies and Swedish at Gustavus Adolphus College. He developed a course on Sami culture after spending a year in Tromsoe, Norway. While there he collaborated as a translator with Harald Gaski on an anthology of Sami prose and poetry: In the Shadow of the Midnight Sun.

PAULUS UTSI (1918-1975) combined his job as teacher of Sami handicraft with writing poetry. He published two collections of poetry. (See article by Harald Gaski).