Harry Martinson

Harry Martinson was born in 1904 in Jämshög, in the province of Blekinge in southern Sweden. His father died when he was six, and his mother soon left for America, leaving the children behind; he was boarded out by the parish to a succession of farms, an upbringing he later rendered in the novel Flowering Nettle. At sixteen he ran away to sea, and for much of the next seven years he sailed as a stoker and deckhand to South America, India and elsewhere, punctuated by spells of vagrancy ashore, before lung trouble brought him home in 1927.

He made his debut with the poems of Spökskepp (1929) and joined the modernist group behind the anthology Fem unga. His sea books, beginning with Cape Farewell (1933), cast the sailor’s world in a fresh, associative prose, and The Road, a novel about a wandering tramp, became one of his most loved works. The defining element of his poetry is an exact attention to the natural world — an insect, a leaf, a dewdrop — held together with a mind increasingly troubled by technology and war. Aniara (1956), a cycle of 103 cantos about an emigrant spaceship that loses its course after a nuclear catastrophe on Earth, gave that anxiety its largest form.

In 1949 Martinson was elected to the Swedish Academy, an unusual distinction for a writer without formal schooling. His share of the 1974 Nobel Prize with Eyvind Johnson, both members of the Academy, provoked fierce criticism in the press, which he took deeply to heart. He died in Stockholm in 1978. Aniara was made into an opera by Karl-Birger Blomdahl in 1959, and his work is now regarded as among the most original in twentieth-century Swedish poetry.