Eyvind Johnson

Eyvind Johnson (1900-76), Swedish novelist, born in Överluleå. By the time he was 19 years of age he had worked in a quarry, a brickyard, and in the lumber trade. He then moved to Stockholm and began to write. During the following years he lived and wrote in Germany, France, Switzerland, and England as well as his native Sweden, producing more than 40 novels and short-story collections in which he often drew upon the hardships he had suffered in his youth.

Johnson was cowinner of the 1974 Nobel Prize in literature. Many of his works have been translated from Swedish, but only a few into English, among them his retelling of the Odyssey, Return to Ithaca (1946; trans. 1952) and The Days of His Grace (1961; trans. 1970). Long an innovator in fictional form, Johnson experimented in his subsequent work with the conception of time as a continuum.