Eyvind Johnson

Johnson was born outside Boden in Norrbotten and out of school at thirteen (timber rafts, sawmills, brickyards), educating himself in workers' libraries before drifting through 1920s Berlin and Paris, where he absorbed the modernists nobody in Sweden was yet reading.

The four-volume Novel of Olof (1934–37) made his own northern boyhood a landmark of Swedish working-class literature, told with techniques out of Joyce and Proust; during the war his Krilon trilogy smuggled anti-Nazi resistance into allegory while he helped edit a clandestine paper for occupied Norway.

Return to Ithaca (1946) opened his great historical period of layered time, deepened in Days of His Grace. The 1974 Nobel, shared with Harry Martinson (both members of the awarding Academy), raised eyebrows abroad, though few disputed the shelf of books behind it. He died in 1976.