Rika Lesser

Rika Lesser is the author of four collections of poetry: Etruscan Things (1983), All We Need of Hell (1995), Growing Back (1997), and Questions of Love (2008). She has been the recipient of the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship, fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Translation Prize of the Swedish Academy.

Lesser has translated poetry collections by Göran Sonnevi, Gunnar Ekelöf, and Claes Andersson, as well as Rilke and Hesse (including Siddhartha: An Indic Poem). She served as Swedish-language editor for Graywolf’s New European Poets. Yale University Press is publishing her translation of Sonnevi’s Mozart’s Third Brain in fall 2009.