Nationality 1: Swedish

Birthdate: 1944

Jesper Svenbro was born on March 10, 1944, in Landskrona, a small town in southern Sweden. His father, a highly respected clergyman, died when Svenbro was a child, and memories of this experience appear in the poet's later work. Svenbro began reading the classics when he was young, and he also enjoyed hiking in Lapland when he was a teenager. He studied for a short time at Yale University and then at the École pratique in Paris. He later earned his doctorate in classics from Lund University, the largest university in Scandinavia. In 1977, he moved to Paris to work for the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, a prominent French public research organization.

After publishing his first volume of poetry in 1966, at age twenty-two, Svenbro concentrated largely on his career as a classical scholar, waiting thirteen years before publishing another collection of poems in...