Leevi Lehto


Leevi Lehto was a Finnish poet, translator, and programmer.

Biography

After making his poetic debut in 1967, he published six volumes of poetry, a novel, Janajevin unet, and an experimental prose work, . He was active in leftist politics and worked as a corporate executive in communications industry. He was also known for his experiments in digital writing, such as the .
His translations, some forty books in total, range from mystery writing to philosophy, sociology, and poetry, including work by Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze, George Orwell, Stephen King, Ian McEwan, Josef Skvorecky, Walter Benjamin, John Keats, John Ashbery, Mickey Spillane and Charles Bernstein. His latest work is the new Finnish translation of Ulysses by James Joyce.
He taught poetry at the Critical Academy in Helsinki and is Chairman of the Planning Group for the yearly Helsinki Poetics Conference, member of the Planning Group for Kuopio Sound Poetry Seminar, responsible for the "poEsia" series of poetry books, member of Editorial Council of , the Brazilian magazine of poetry, and Contributing Editor of US-based . Leevi Lehto's first volume of poetry in English, Lake Onega and Other Poems, is published by Salt Publishing in November 2006.
Lehto died of multiple system atrophy on 22 June 2019, aged 68.