|
Harry Edmund Martinson
(1904 - 1978)
Swedish novelist and poet who was the first self-taught, working-class
writer to be elected to the Swedish Academy (1949). With Eyvind Johnson
he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1974.
Martinson spent his childhood in a series of foster homes and his youth
and early adulthood as a merchant seaman, labourer, and vagrant. His
first book of poetry, Spokskepp ("Ghost Ship"), much influenced
by Rudyard Kipling's Seven Seas, appeared in 1929. His early experiences
are described in two autobiographical novels, Nasslorna blomma (1935;
Flowering Nettle) and Vagen ut (1936; "The Way Out"), and
in original and sensitive travel sketches, Resor utan mal (1932; "Aimless
Journeys") and Kap Farval (1933; Cape Farewell). Among his best-known
works are Passad (1945; "Trade Wind"), a collection of poetry;
Vagen till Klockrike (1948; The Road), a novel that sympathetically
examines the lives of tramps and other social outcasts; and Aniara (1956;
Aniara, A Review of Man in Time and Space), an epic poem about space
travel that was turned into a successful opera in 1959 by Karl Birger
Blomdahl. Martinson's language is lyrical, unconstrained, innovative,
and sometimes obscure; his imagery, sensuous; his style, often starkly
realistic or expressionistic; and his philosophy, primitivistic. He
was married to another noted Swedish writer, Moa Martinson, from 1929
to 1940.
|