Tomás Cohen

Tomás Cohen (1984) is a Chilean writer and translator who was born in the seaside town of Pelluhue. He studied musicology and art at the P. U. Católica de Chile, art history at New York University, and Tibetan translation at the International Buddhist Academy in Kathmandu, Nepal. After a stay at a Buddhist monastery in Kathmandu, he subsequently pursued deeper studies in Tibetan and Sanskrit, culminating in a master's degree in Tibetan philology from the Universität Hamburg in Germany.

He has published poetry collections Redoble del ronroneo (2016), Un árbol de luz íntima (2019), and Tríada mayor (2023), which was published in German translation as Eine Sternwarte im Badezimmer (Elif Verlag, 2023). His poems have been translated into nine languages and published in international journals and anthologies. He has received grants for his work from the Pablo Neruda Foundation and the National Book Fund (Chile), the Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators (Sweden), the Looren House of Translators (Switzerland) and the Berlin Senate. Since March 2023, he has been artistic director of VOCATIONS, a series of new musical events organized by Haus für Poesie in collaboration with Akademie der Künste Berlin. He is also a board member of Unabhängige Lesereihen e.V. and was editor-at-large of the magazine Asymptote. 

As a translator, he received the Chilean Cultural Fund Award for his translation of the poetry of Timothy Donnelly (from English) and Sakya Pandita (from Tibetan). In addition to writing poems, he is also a printmaker and painter.

Tomás and his son live in Berlin.