Helena Sinervo

Helena Sinervo is a Finnish poet, novelist and translator. She has published three novels, eleven poetry collections and three children's books and her works has been translated into more than 25 languages. Sinervo was awarded the Finlandia Prize for Fiction in 2004.

Life

Sinervo was born in the Finnish city of Tampere in 1961 and she studied the piano and music. She was at the Tampere Conservatoire where she qualified to teach piano. She obtained her doctorate at Helsinki University. She became a published poet in 1994.
Sinervo has translated poems by the American poet Elizabeth Bishop, the French poet Yves Bonnefoy, Maurice Blanchot and the symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé. Sinervo spent a further year studying in Paris in the 1990s.
She has written a novel based on the life of the Finnish poet Eeva-Liisa Manner who died in 1995.
She has written song lyrics for the first album by Liisa Lux in 2002.
Sinervo won the Finlandia Prize for Fiction in 2004.