Roger Greenwald grew up in New York, where he attended The City College and the St. Marks in the Bouwerie Poetry Project workshop. He has earned several major awards for his poetry and translations, including the prize for poetry of the Norma Epstein National Competition, the CBC Radio / Saturday Night Literary Award for poetry, the F. R. Scott Translation Prize, the Richard Wilbur Translation Prize, the American-Scandinavian Foundation Translation Prize (twice), and the Inger Sjöberg Translation Prize. In 2003 he took First Prize in the Travel Literature category of the CBC Literary Awards, for a story called “Dents in the Laurentians.”

Greenwald has published one book of poems, Connecting Flight (Williams-Wallace, 1993), and several volumes of poetry in translation, including Paal-Helge Haugen’s Stone Fences (translated with William Mishler, University of Missouri Press, 1986) and Wintering with the Light (Sun & Moon Press, 1997); Jacques Werup’s The Time in Malmö on the Earth (Exile Editions, 1989); and more recently, Through Naked Branches: Selected Poems of Tarjei Vesaas (Princeton University Press, 2000)—which was a finalist for the 2001 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation—and North in the World: Selected Poems of Rolf Jacobsen (University of Chicago Press, 2002).

He has also translated a novel by Erland Josephson, A Story about Mr. Silberstein (Hydra Books / Northwestern University Press, 1995, paperback 2001), and a novel for young adults, I Miss You, I Miss You! by Peter Pohl and Kinna Gieth (R & S, 1999). He has published in numerous journals and has given readings in Canada, the U.S., England, The Netherlands, and Norway.

From 1969 until 1994, Greenwald led the Innis College Writers Workshops in poetry and fiction; he has also given a poetry workshop for Norwegian poets under the sponsorship of the Norwegian Authors Union. From 1970 until 1995 he edited WRIT Magazine, an international literary annual that he founded. He has delivered lectures on translation at Boston University, the University of Oslo, and York University. He is a member of PEN, the Association for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies in Canada, and the American Literary Translators Association.