Kim Simonsen (Faroe Islands)

Kim Simonsen (b. 1970) is a poet, publisher, curator and academic. He has published several poetry collections, and his works have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. 

The conceptual foundations of Simonsen’s work are environmental philosophy and poetics, speculative realism, interspecies relations and ecocriticism. Although the writer’s works express his personal emotional experiences, such as the loss of his father, overwhelming grief, and the relationship between humans and the planet, a philosophical dimension is always present. Kim Simonsen’s work crosses literary genres and conventional academic and artistic fields. In the author’s own words, his literary activity is not anchored in national literary frameworks or narrow concepts of linguistic identity. He is not shaped by a single nation but by a constellation of different places, each of which opens a new space for him. 
For this reason, Simonsen founded the publishing house Eksil (Exile) in 2007; the choice of name was a deliberate strategy – if the default condition of literature is nationality, an alternative default must be created alongside it. Simonsen says that Eksil should be a place where works are understood through their ideas rather than their origins. With his most recent poetry collection to date, The Biological Composition of a Drop of Seawater Resembles the Blood in My Veins (“Lívfrøðiliga samansetingin í einum dropa av havvatni minnir um blóðið í mínum æðrum”, Eksil, 2023), Simonsen was nominated for the 2024 Nordic Council Literature Prize. In Estonian, Kim Simonsen’s poetry collection is published by Nordur (translated from Faroese by Andry Arro), and the book is available at the event. In addition to Estonian, Simonsen’s poems have been translated into Danish, English, Macedonian, Italian, Hungarian and Chinese.