User:Bsjoholm

Barbara Sjoholm is an American author. She changed her name from Barbara Wilson to Barbara Sjoholm in 2000. She co-founded Seal Press in 1976 and Women in Translation in 1989.

Life and Work

Barbara Sjoholm [Wilson] was raised in Long Beach, California. Her grandparents were Christian Science practitioners and her mother was also an avid follower of the church. Sjoholm has described her childhood in the memoir Blue Windows: A Christian Science Childhood and in the novel If You Had a Family. Sjoholm attended the University of Washington and lived in Europe for several years before settling in Seattle. She co-founded the influential feminist publishing house Seal Press in 1976 with Rachel da Silva and worked as a publisher for many years. She also founded and directed the imprint Women in Translation from 1989-2004.

Sjoholm began publishing short stories in the 1970s. In 1984 she published one of the first feminist mysteries with a lesbian amateur sleuth, Murder in the Collective. She went on to publish two further mysteries featuring printer-sleuth Pam Nilsen, before creating the character Cassandra Reilly, a Spanish translator based in London. Cassandra Reilly appeared in several mysteries, including Gaudi Afternoon, the winner of a British Crime Writers' Award. A film of Gaudi Afternoon appeared in 2000, directed by Susan Seidelman and starring Judy Davis and Marcia Gay Harden. Sjoholm's mysteries have been translated into German, Finnish, Japanese, Spanish, and Italian.

Sjoholm has translated several works from Norwegian, including the short stories of Cora Sandel and a novel by Ebba Haslund, Nothing Happened. She has recently translated With the Lapps in the High Mountains from Danish by the Danish artist and ethnographer, Emilie Demant Hatt.

Sjoholm's literary nonfiction includes the memoirs Blue Windows [as Barbara Wilson],and Incognito Street. She has also written two travel books, The Pirate Queen: In Search of Grace O'Malley and Other Legendary Women of the Sea, and The Palace of the Snow Queen: Winter Travels in Lapland. Blue Windows and The Pirate Queen were both nominated for the USA PEN Award.

External links

Barbara Sjoholm's webpage (www.barbarasjoholm.com)