Karin Boye is one of the trio of great Scandinavian women poets, along with Edith Södergran and Mirjam Tuominen – all three published in English by Bloodaxe Books. Born in 1900, Karin Boye was a poet of ideas, and wrote a powerful prophetic novel, Kallocain. Her involvement in the radical literary and artistic movement Clarté during the 1920s led to her interest in psychoanalysis, which influenced her literary work as well as her personal development during the latter years of her life. Intellectually and emotionally, she was far ahead of her time, and her controversial writings included the novel Crisis, in which she depicted the religious turmoil of her adolescence and her discovery of her own bisexuality. Her poetry has a strenuously angular quality which reflects – with naked candour – the harsh realities of her tragic inner struggle, which was eventually to lead to her suicide in 1941. David McDuff's translation of her Complete Poems was published by Bloodaxe Books in 1994. His translation of Kallocain was published in Penguin Classics in 2019.
