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.

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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.

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