Harry Martinson

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Harry Martinson (May 6, 1904 – February 11, 1978) was an author and poet from the Swedish province Blekinge in south-eastern Sweden. In 1949 he was elected into the Swedish Academy. He was awarded a joint Nobel Prize in Literature in 1974 together with fellow Swede Eyvind Johnson. The choice for Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson was very controversial as both were on the Nobel panel themselves and Graham Greene, Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov were the favored candidates that year.

1 Life
2 Bibliography
3 External links

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Life

At a young age he lost both his parents, whereafter he was stationed on the Swedish country side as a foster child (Kommunalbarn). At the age of sixteen, Martinson got away, and enrolled on a ship. He spent the next years sailing around the world, for example to Brazil and India.

After that he suffered from lung problems, and got ashore in Sweden. The next years were spent travelling around Sweden, sometimes as a vagabond on the country roads. In Malmö, he was arrested for vagrancy, at the age of 21.

His first success came with the semi-auto biographical Nässlorna blomma (Flowering Nettle), in 1935, about hardships encountered by a young boy on the country side. It has since been translated into more than 30 languages.

One of his most famous works is the novel Aniara, which is a story of the space craft Aniara, that during a journey through space loses its course, and subsequently aimlessly floats through space, without destination. The book was published in (1956), and became in 1959 an opera, composed by Karl-Birger Blomdahl. The novel is, like The Odyssey, written in the poetic form of hexameter. The book has been described as "an epic story of man's fragility and folly".

From 1929 to 1940 he was married to the Swedish writer Moa Martinson. An ensuing critique in the 1970s, that the sensitive spirited Harry found hard to cope with, as well as his loneliness, finally led him to commit suicide with a pair of scissors on Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm in 1978.

The 100th aniversary of his birth was celebrated around Sweden in 2004.

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