Barbara Christina Elisabeth Helsingius-Koski (née Helsingius; 27 September 1937 – 9 March 2017) was a Swedish-speaking Finnish singer, poet, and Olympic fencer.

[4] Trained as a gym teacher, she took her master's degree in pedagogy at Stanford University (1963).

Interested in American art and folk music, she began to record, and her first release, Barbara (1966), was a collection of American folk songs, translated to Finnish.

[citation needed] From 1968 to 1975, she lived in Oslo with her husband, Henry William "Hank" Koski, a diplomat at the U.S. embassy.

[3] Helsingius died following a long illness on 9 March 2017 in Espoo, Finland at the age of 79.