biography
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1900–76)
|
| biography:
| Writer, born near Boden, NE Sweden. After minimal schooling, and a number of years in mainly manual occupations, he spent most of the 1920s in Paris and Berlin, and began to write. His four-part Romanen om Olof (1934–7, The Story of Olof) is the finest of the many working-class autobiographical novels written in Sweden in the 1930s. He was much involved in anti-Nazi causes, and produced a number of novels, especially the Krilon series (1941–3), castigating totalitarianism. The same humanitarian values are evident in his later historical novels, particularly Strändernas svall (1946, trans Return to Ithaca), and Hans nådes tid (1960, trans The Days of his Grace). He shared the 1974 Nobel Prize for Literature with his fellow Swede, Harry Martinson. |
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