Photo by Magnus Green
Florence Vilén (born December 30, 1941, Stockholm, Sweden), cultural historian, essayist, teacher of history of art, and haiku and haibun poet writing in English, Swedish, and German. Her English-language haiku, haibun, and chapbook-length sequences have been published in Haiku Harvest, The Heron’s Nest, World Haiku Review, and Mainichi Haiku in English, her Swedish work in Haiku, Fri Haiku, and Blåeld. A haiku of hers won the Kusamakura Haiku Competition (2001). Vilén’s work has been anthologized in Susumu Takiguchi’s Wild Flowers, New Leaves: A Collection of World Haiku (2002), David Cobb’s Euro-haiku: A Bi-lingual Anthology (2007), and Johan Bergstad’s Snödroppar: Elva svenska haikudiktare / Snowdrops: Eleven Swedish Haiku Poets (2009). Her fantasy/historical novel, Dragon’s Progress, was published in 2008, and she has contributed articles and reviews to the magazine Sígnum on haiku and other cultural and political topics. Vilén served as secretary of the Swedish Haiku Society (2000–2014) and editor (with Helga Härle) of its journal Haiku (2006–2015), and helped organize the Second European Haiku Conference in Vadstena, Sweden (2007). She lives in central Stockholm.
Note: This is an abstract of a longer biographical article to come.