Book of Clouds

Juris Kronbergs is a poet and translator. He was born in Sweden in 1946, to a family of Latvian artists. He studied Literature, Science, Nordic and Baltic languages at the University of Stockholm, and the Theory of Translation and 20th-century Poetry at the University of Cambridge, England. At the end of the 1980s and the beginning of 1990s he worked as a radio journalist for Radio Sweden, and as an interpreter for the Swedish parliament, government and the Nordic Council of Ministers. Juris served as a diplomat for ten years, Cultural Attaché at the Latvian Embassy in Sweden (1992-2002). He has been a guest lecturer at the University of Stockholm, University of Uppsala, several Swedish University Colleges, as well as Stanford University (USA), University of Toronto and the Foreign Service Institute (Washington DC). He has been the President of the Latvian P.E.N. centre, he is an honorary member of the Latvian Academy of Sciences, a recipient of the Latvian Three Star order, the Swedish North Star order, and several scholarships and prizes for poetry and translation, including the prize for best poetry collection of the year in Latvia for his collections Wolf One-Eye (1997) and On the Balcony (2017).Sixteen collections of his poetry have been published, as well as poetry on CD (in Latvia and in Sweden). His output includes sixty books of translations, mostly Latvian poetry (but also prose) into Swedish, and Swedish literature into Latvian. His poetry have been translated into many languages: English, Swedish, German, French, Italian, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic, Finnish, Estonian, Lithuanian, Chec, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Armenian, Greek, Slovenian, Catalan, Irish, Welsh, Chinese, Korean. In 2006, the British publisher ARC published a volume of the complete Wolf One-Eye collection in English (translated by Mara Rozitis).Anete Melece was born in Latvia in 1983. She studied visual communication at the Art Academy of Latvia (BA) and animation at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Art (MA). She is an illustrator, animator and graphic designer currently based in Zürich, Switzerland. Richard O’Brien is a poet, translator and academic based in Birmingham, UK.

Readers are in for a real treat as Latvian poet Juris Kronbergs, born in Sweden to a family of Latvian artists, has created an innovative selection of poetry – a mix of funny and playful poems that combine scientific fact and the very many meanings of the word ‘cloud’... It’s no mean feat to translate poetry and Māra Rozīte and Richard O’Brien have done an excellent job in making these poems accessible in English to a whole new audience.