Mikael Svonni

Svonni grew up in a reindeer-herding family in the Gabna Sami village in the municipality of Kiruna, spending the first two years of his life living in a peat goahti.^[1] One of the places he spent time was at his family's camp on Lake Rautas (Northern Sami: Rávttasjávri).^[1]

In 1993, he successfully defended his dissertation at Umeå University on the Sámi spoken by Sámi schoolchildren, a topic which many of his publications are devoted to. From that year until 2008, Svonni worked as a professor of Sami Language Studies at the Department of Language Studies at Umeå University. In 2008, he was named professor of Sámi Linguistics at the University of Tromsø where he worked until his retirement in 2017^[2]

During his academic career, he published scientific articles about Sámi in schools and later on worked on grammatical issues in Sámi.

As a translator, he has translated books like Astrid Lindgren's Ronia, the Robber's Daughter and August Strindberg's A Dream Play into Northern Sámi.^[3][4]

He won the Gollegiella language award in 2014 in recognition and appreciation of the many years he has dedicated to the Northern Sámi language in Sweden.^[5][6]

He is married to Inez Svonni Fjällström, with whom he has three children.^[1] They live in Rávttas, north of Kiruna. Together, they founded a publishing house called Ravda Lágádus^[3] in order to publish a wider range of non-fiction, fiction, and children's books in Sámi.^[4][7]