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Contributor

Eric Dickens

Contributor

Eric Dickens

Eric Dickens was born in Yorkshire, UK, in 1953, and attended grammar school near Birmingham. He studied Swedish and literature at the University of East Anglia (UEA) during the early 1970s. Since then he has taught English in Finland, Sweden, and the Netherlands. He published his first book-length translation, from Swedish, in 1985: Jan Mårtenson’s Drottningholm, The Palace by the Lakeside. Over the 1990s and 2000s Eric has translated several books of fiction by Jaan Kross, Friedebert Tuglas, Mati Unt, and Toomas Vint from the Estonian for British and American publishers. More recently he has translated the short novel Melancholy 2 by the Norwegian author Jon Fosse. Eric has lived in Finland, Poland, the Netherlands, and Estonia, each for a year or more, and now lives in Sweden. He speaks Swedish and Dutch fluently, and has a reading knowledge of French, German, Polish, and the larger Scandinavian languages. “The White Room” is Eric’s first published translation from Finnish, done in cooperation with the author.

Articles by Eric Dickens

A White Room and a Blackout Curtain
By Eric Dickens
When I was fifteen, living in Solihull, England, the 1968 Eurovision Song Contest added a new language to those spoken at home (English and Dutch) and those taught at grammar school (French, German, and…
The White Room
By Tiina Laitila Kälvemark
I have been in the white room for five months and twenty days now.
Translated from Finnish by Eric Dickens
Multilingual