Harry Edmund Martinson

Harry Edmund Martinson (1904-78), Swedish author and Nobel laureate. He was born May 6, 1904, in Jämshög, Blekinge Province. The son of a sea captain, he ran away to sea himself; many of his literary themes stem from his lonely childhood and from his six years at sea. Martinson wrote about 20 novels and numerous collections of essays, poems, and short stories. Best known outside Sweden is his lyrical epic Aniara (1956; trans. 1963), a cycle of 103 poems about the voyage of a spaceship carrying 8000 humans away from a radiation-destroyed earth. Among his other notable writings are the travel book Cape Farewell (1933; trans. 1936), the autobiographical Flowering Nettles (1935; trans. 1936), and the novel The Road (1948; trans. 1955). In 1949 he was elected to the Swedish Academy. He shared the 1974 Nobel Prize for literature with his countryman Eyvind Johnson, being cited for “writings that catch the dewdrop and reflect the cosmos.”