Writer Inger Christensen was born in Vejle, Denmark on January 16, 1935. She enrolled in medical school, but had to withdraw due to financial reasons. She received a teaching degree with a concentration in German and mathematics from the Aarhus College of Education. She was a teacher for a few years before becoming a full-time writer. She wrote poems, essays, short stories, children's books, and plays. Her works include It, Alphabet, Butterfly Valley: A Requiem, The Painted Room, and Azorno. She received numerous awards throughout her career including the 1994 Nordic Authors' Prize. She died on January 2, 2009 at the age of 73.
Anne Carson was born December 16, 1950. Carson is a poet, an essayist, and a classicist. She is the director of the graduate program in Classics at McGill University, where she also teaches Latin and Greek. Carson is perhaps besst know for Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse, which won the 1998 QSPELL Prize for Poetry. Carson recently won the 2001 Griffin Poetry Prize for Men in the Off Hours. Carson also won the T.S. Eliot poetry prize for The Beauty of the Husband, the first woman to win the award in its nine-year history. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998 and received a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship in 2000. Carson is the author of seven books.
Susanna Nied's brilliant translation of alphabet won the American-Scandinavian PEN Translation Prize.