Verner von Heidenstam

Carl Gustaf Verner von Heidenstam was born in 1859 at Olshammar, in Örebro County, into a noble family; his father was an engineer. He was schooled in Stockholm and began to study painting at the academy there, but poor health cut his training short, and he spent years travelling through southern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.

His first collection, Pilgrimage: The Wander Years (1888), saturated with the colours of the Orient, broke decisively with the naturalism then dominant in Swedish letters, and in the essay Renaissance (1889) he called for a literature of imagination and beauty. The long narrative work Hans Alienus (1892) and Poems (1895) followed. Turning to the national past, he wrote The Charles Men (1897–98), linked stories of King Charles XII and his soldiers, and The Tree of the Folkungs (1905–07), an epic of a medieval dynasty. New Poems (1915) explores solitude and the ennobling of the self in a more austere, reflective voice.

In 1910 he clashed with August Strindberg in a bitter newspaper controversy over the direction of Swedish culture, and in 1912 he was elected to the Swedish Academy. The Nobel Prize followed in 1916, while Sweden stood neutral in the war, awarded by an Academy of which he was himself a member. He spent his last years at Övralid, his house in Östergötland, and died there in May 1940.