Nobel prize for poetry: the Minnesota connection

There was a bit of a flurry in the MPR news arts department these last days as rumor spread that Hibbing native Bob Dylan was a serious contender for the Nobel Prize for Poetry.

Tomas Transtromer

Today it was announced that the prize went instead to Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer.

But wait! There’s still a “Minnesota connection.”

One of the few people translating Tomas Transtromer’s poetry into English is Minnesota poet Robert Bly, and one of those collections – The Half-Finished Heaven – was published by Minnesota’s own Graywolf Press.