| ||
| Born in 1958 in Harpenden, UK, Anne Blonstein trained as a geneticist at Cambridge University and moved to Basel,Switzerland, in 1983 to do postdoctoral research. She began publishing poetry in 1987, leaving the world of academic sciencein 1991 to concentrate on her writing. She earned a living as a freelance translator and editor. She authored six full-lengthcollections: the blue pearl (Salt, 2003), worked on screen (Poetry Salzburg, 2005), memory's morning(Shearsman, 2008), correspondence with nobody (Ellectrique Press, 2008), the butterflies and the burnings(Dusie Press, 2009), and to be continued (Shearsman Books, 2011). Almost exactly three years after she was diagnosedwith cancer in the Spring of 2008, Anne Blonstein died in the Ita Wegman Klinik in Arlesheim near Basel in the early hoursof Tuesday April 19, 2011, three days before her 53rd birthday. "[Blonstein's] terse, unusual images are the outcome of an English language that, mated to the other idioms she lives with- German, French, and Hebrew - shapes the transnational world of a language nomad. ... In her most recent work, Hebrew ...has become the place to which she ties her English and the other languages she uses in her life through graphic/visualand semantic associations. ... For Blonstein languages, with their varieties and differences, have become the endangeredspecies of our globalized world." Marina Camboni in Contemporary Women's Writing 1:1-2 (2007), 42. An interview with Anne Blonstein can be found atThe Argotist Online. Anne Blonstein on the "Poems and Poetics" blogspot. | ||
Books available from Poetry Salzburg: Anne Blonstein: worked on screen, January 2005. 128 pp. ISBN-13 978-3-901993-18-3; ISBN-10 3-901993-18-5 |
