Anselm Hollo
Anselm Hollo is an Associate Professor in the Graduate Writing and Poetics Department at The Naropa Institute, a Buddhist-inspired nonsectarian liberal arts college in Boulder, Colorado. He was born in Helsinki, Finland, but in his early twenties, he left Finland to live and work as a writer and translator, first in Germany and Austria, then in London, where he was employed by the BBC's European Services in their Finnish Program from 1958 to 1967. Translations into Finnish from that time include Allen Ginsberg's Howl and John Lennon's In His Own Write. His own award winning poetry has been widely published and he also works as a translator of contemporary Finnish authors.
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Hollo has published more than thirty-five books and chapbooks of his poetry, most recently Corvus (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1995) and AHOE (Erie CO: Smokeproof Press, 1997). He has also translated many contemporary Finnish poets, among them Paavo Haavikko (Selected Poems 1949 - 1988, Manchester UK: Carcanet Press, 1991) and Pentti Saarikoski (Trilogy: the last three books, Los Angeles CA: Sun & Moon, 1998), as well as fiction, plays, and poetry (by a.o. Brecht, Paul Klee, Genet, Blok, Louis Malle) from the German, French, Swedish, and Finnish.
Hollo's honors and awards include the New York State Creative Artists' Public Service Award (1976), a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Poet's Fellowship (1979), the P.E.N./American-Scandinavian Foundation Award for Poetry in Translation (1981), the American-Scandinavian Foundation Award for Poetry in Translation (1989), Fund for Poetry Awards for Contributions to Contemporary Poetry (1989, 1991), The Finnish Government Prize for Translation of Finnish Literature (1996), and a Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Poetry 1995-1996 (1996).