Pia Tafdrup was born in 1952 in Copenhagen. She has published over 20 books in Danish since her first collection appeared in 1981, and her work has been translated into many languages. Her fourth collection, Spring Tide, was published in English by Forest in 1989. In 1991 she published a celebrated statement of her poetics, Walking Over Water. She received the 1999 Nordic Council Literature Prize – Scandinavia’s most prestigious literary award – for Queen's Gate, which was published in David McDuff’s English translation by Bloodaxe in 2001. Also in 2001, she was appointed a Knight of the Order of Dannebrog, and in 2006 she received the Nordic Prize from the Swedish Academy.  In 2009 she won the international Jan Smrek Prize (awarded to non-Slovak, foreign poets) for her poetry. Her latest work translated into English is Tarkovsky’s Horses and other poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2010), combining The Whales in Paris (2002) and Tarkovsky's Horses (2006).