Emilia Amper grew up in Torsås, a small town in South East Sweden, and started playing the nyckelharpa at the age of ten. She holds a BA in musicology and composition from the NTNU in Trondheim, as well as a BA in Swedish folk music from the Royal College of Music in Stockholm and a Nordic Master in folk music from the same institution in conjunction with the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, the Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, Southern Denmark and the Ole Bull Academy in Norway.
Emilia has toured in Europe, China, the USA, Canada, Namibia, India, Iran and Brazil, both solo and with Emilia Amper Band and folk-music groups such as ODE, Skaran and Blink, as well as performing as soloist with various chamber and symphony orchestras in Sweden, Norway and Germany. She has played with the Swiss dance company Flamencos en route at the Ballett am Rhein in Düsseldorf, and collaborated with Persian, Kurdish and Indian musicians and with pop/ rock and jazz musicians (including Jon Lord, Deep Purple’s former keyboardist, who wrote a song for her).
With the Trondheim Soloists, Gjermund Larsen and 2L she won a Norwegian Spellemannspris in 2010 for the best classical album and was nominated for two US Grammy Awards. The same year she was proclaimed world champion on the nyckelharpa. Her debut solo disc Trollfågeln (The Magic Bird, BIS-2013) was nominated to a Swedish Grammis Award in 2013 and the same year she was named Artist of the Year at the Folk & Världsmusikgalan (The Folk and World Music Gala) held in Gävle, Sweden.
