In late 1946, Stig Dagerman was assigned by the Swedish newspaper Expressen to report on life in Germany immediately after the fall of the Third Reich. First published in Sweden in 1947, German Autumn, a collection of the articles written for that assignment, was unlike any other reporting at the time. While most Allied and foreign journalists spun their writing on the widely held belief that the German people deserved their fate, Dagerman disagreed and reported on the humanness of the men and women ruined by the war-their guilt and suffering. Dagerman was already a prominent writer in Sweden, but the publication and broad reception of German Autumn throughout Europe established him as a compassionate journalist and led to the long-standing international influence of the book. Presented here in its first American edition with a compelling new foreword by Mark Kurlansky, Dagerman's essays on the tragic aftermath of war, suffering, and guilt are as hauntingly relevant today amid current global conflict as they were sixty years ago.

Harry Martinson (1904-78) sailed the oceans from 1920 to 1927 as an escape from an unhappy childhood in rural southwest Sweden. Returning to his native tracts, he devoted himself to writing and eventually became one of the best-known authors of his time, his books appealing widely both to academics and to the general reader. His election to the Swedish Academy in 1949 was seen as a gesture towards a generation of more or less self-educated working-class writers, and he shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in Literature with novelist Eyvind Johnson. Sections of the Swedish press responded with such vehemence to the way Academicians had rewarded two of their own that Martinson vowed never to publish again, and his last years were darkened by despair and depression as his view of the world became bleaker. His books reflect his upbringing, his travels and his interest in science and social questions. His poetry has many strands but the one most often admired is that which combines close scrutiny of the small events of the natural world with an intense awareness of cosmic distances in time and space. While his prose books have reached a wide readership in several languages, Martinson's poems have appeared only sporadically in English. Robin Fulton's translations provide the first substantial selection of Harry Martinson's poetry for English-language readers. His edition has an introductory essay by Staffan Soderblom, was a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation and won him the Bernard Shaw Prize for Swedish Translation.

This title is a Poetry Book Society recommended translation.

In this generous selection of nearly half of Hauge's poetic work, Robin Fulton displays the range, variety and distinctive qualities of his poetry. Though deeply rooted in the West Norwegian landscape which he evokes so memorably, Hauge's poetry has a kinship in background and temperament with that of Robert Frost, while also sharing the wry humour and cool economy of William Carlos Williams and Brecht, whom he translated.

Often epigrammatic, yet lyrical in impulse, his poems have a serenity which makes them unusually rewarding.

Tomas Transtroemer (1931-2015) was Sweden's most important poet of the past fifty years. This book contains all the poems he published, including those from the Bloodaxe Collected Poems of 1987, as well as three later collections, For Living and Dead (1989), The Sad Gondola (1996) and The Great Enigma (2004), and a prose memoir. A further revised edition was published in 2011. In Sweden he has been called a 'buzzard poet' because his haunting, visionary poetry shows the world from a height, in a mystic dimension, but brings every detail of the natural world into sharp focus. His poems are often explorations of the borderland between sleep and waking, between the conscious and unconscious states. Transtroeomer was born in Stockholm, where he grew up, but spent many long summers on the island of Runmaroe in the nearby archipelago, evoking that landscape in his early work, which draws on the aesthetic tradition of Swedish nature poetry. His later poetry is more personal, open and relaxed, often reflecting his broad interests: travel, music, painting, archaeology and natural sciences. Many of his poems use compressed description and concentrate on a single distinct image as a catalyst for psychological insight and metaphysical interpretation. This acts as a meeting-point or threshold between conflicting elements or forces: sea and land, man and nature, freedom and control. Robin Fulton worked with Tomas Transtroemer on each of his collections as they were published over many years, which involved detailed exchanges between translator and poet on the meaning and music of numerous poems. There have been several translations as well as some books of so-called "versions" of Transtromer's poetry published in English, but Fulton's is the most authoritative and comprehensive edition of his poetry published anywhere.

In the 1960s and 1970s Robin Fulton Macpherson was active in Scottish literary life as a poet, reviewer and editor. Since 1973 his home base has been in Norway and in the decades since he has built a solid reputation as a translator of Scandinavian poets, such as Tomas Tranströmer, Kjell Espmark and Harry Martinson from Swedish and Olav H. Hauge from Norwegian. His A Northern Habitat: Collected Poems 1960-2010 (Marick Press, 2013) was described by Carol Rumens in The Guardian as "a major achievement, enriching the habitat of contemporary letters in our own archipelago and beyond." John Glenday, in Northwords Now, referred to the book as "a real treasure of a collection, a weighty, important reminder that Fulton Macpherson is a prominent figure in Scottish poetry... His poetry is enduring as granite. It will weather well", while Peter M. McDonald, in Rain Taxi, felt certain that "A Northern Habitat will stand the test of time. It is arguably the most important book yet from a Scottish poet in this new millennium." Ancient Light is his third Shearsman collection, following 2020's Arrivals of Light. "Many of these [ poems in Arrivals of Light ] consist of just a few lines but they're suffused with a remarkable keenness of eye and, especially, freshness of thought and phrase. The very title ... speaks to a sense of continuing revelation, or more accurately revelations." -Chris Powici, Northwords Now

Kjell Espmark (b.1930) was Professor of Comparative Literature at Stockholm University from 1978 to 1995 and has been a member of The Swedish Academy since 1981, serving as Chairman of The Nobel Committee from 1988 to 2004. He has published twenty volumes of poetry, ten novels, and over a dozen volumes of literary criticism. His many awards include The Bellman Prize, The Tranströmer Prize, Il Premio Capri and Il Premio Internazionale Camaiore. He is an officer of L'ordre de Mérite. He has been translated into over twenty languages. Of the Spanish version of his latest book of poetry, Martin Lopez-Vega wrote in El Mundo: "The Creation confirms that we are faced with one of the most important poets of our time." Many of Espmark's poems are dramatic monologues in which the dead, some famous, some anonymous, speak to us, hoping for our attention. Another consistent feature of his poetry, and one which we can see extending over six decades, is the coherence we find within each volume, echoes and cross-references linking poems not only within a single collection but from book to book.

In the 1960s and 1970s Robin Fulton Macpherson was active in Scottish literary life as a poet, reviewer and editor. Since 1973 his home base has been in Norway and, in the decades since, he has built a solid reputation as a translator of Scandinavian poets, such as Tomas Tranströmer, Kjell Espmark and Harry Martinson from Swedish and Olav H. Hauge from Norwegian. His A Northern Habitat: Collected Poems 1960–2010 (Marick Press, 2013) was described by Carol Rumens in The Guardian as “a major achievement, enriching the habitat of contemporary letters in our own archipelago and beyond.” John Glenday, in Northwards Now, referred to the book as “a real treasure of a collection, a weighty, important reminder that Fulton Macpherson is a prominent figure in Scottish poetry… His poetry is enduring as granite. It will weather well”, while Peter M. McDonald, in Rain Taxi, felt certain that “A Northern Habitat will stand the test of time. It is arguably the most important book yet from a Scottish poet in this new millennium.”

Poetry. Richard Price hailed him as "a brilliant poet of memory. Here are reflections that are in turn puzzled, fond, analytical; beautifully austere." His poems need time and reward the time spent.