Pär Lagerkvist

Pär Lagerkvist was born in 1891 in Växjö, in the southern Swedish province of Småland, the son of a railway worker, and grew up in a devoutly Lutheran household. As a young man he rejected the faith of his parents, but the religious imagination of his childhood never left him. After brief university studies at Uppsala he travelled to Paris in 1913, where contact with Cubism and the new painting convinced him that literature, too, needed to be rebuilt from its elements; his manifesto Word Art and Picture Art argued as much.

Anguish (1916), written in the shadow of the First World War, brought expressionism into Swedish poetry with its stark cries of dread. In drama he experimented in the manner of Strindberg; in prose he refined a deliberately simple, almost liturgical style. The Hangman (1933) and The Dwarf (1944), the confession of a malevolent court dwarf in Renaissance Italy, confronted the evil of the age of dictators. Barabbas (1950), the story of the criminal released in Christ’s place who can neither believe nor turn away, brought him an international audience; The Sibyl and a late cycle of novels pursued the same restless search for a God who may not be there.

Lagerkvist was elected to the Swedish Academy in 1940; the Nobel Prize followed in 1951, a year after Barabbas had carried his name well beyond Scandinavia. He continued to write poetry, including Evening Land, into old age, and died in Stockholm in 1974.