Mariane Petersen (born 1937[1]) is a Greenlandic poet, translator, museum curator, and politician.[2]
Biography
Petersen was born in Maniitsoq, a town in western Greenland that was then known as Sukkertoppen.[3] She is trained as a translator and has translated various books from Danish into Greenlandic.[4] Significant works of translation include Vinterbørn by Dea Trier Mørch and Århundradets kärlekssaga by Märta Tikkanen.[5]
She also worked for many years as a curator at the Greenland National Museum, serving as director from 1982 until her retirement in 2004.[4][6]
In 1988 she published her first volume of poetry, Niviugaq aalakoortoq allallu. It was the first poetry collection published by a woman in Greenlandic. For this work, she was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 1993. That year she published Inuiaat nunaallu, an epic poem bout the history of Greenland, followed by the collection Asuliivik asuli in 1997.[7][8][9] In 2012, she was honored with the Frederik Nielsen Memorial Fund's 10,000-kroner prize.[10]
Her latest work, Piniartorsuit kinguaavi, was also nominated for the Nordic Council prize in 2013, though she lost to the Danish-Norwegian author Kim Leine.[11][12]
Petersen's poetry is generally humorous in tone and often deals with everyday life in Greenland.[13][9] She writes in both Greenlandic and Danish, translating her own work.[4]
She is also a politician, having previously sat on the Nuuk Municipal Council.[5]
