Harry Martinson



Harry Martinson (May 6, 1904 – February 11, 1978) was a Swedish sailor, author and poet. 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. They and Graham Greene, Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov were the favored candidates that year.

Life
Martinson was born in Jämshög, Blekinge County in south-eastern Sweden. At a young age he lost both his parents whereafter he was placed as a foster child (Kommunalbarn) in the Swedish countryside. At the age of sixteen Martinson ran away and signed onto a ship to spend the next years sailing around the world visiting countries such as Brazil and India. A few years later lung problems forced him to set ashore in Sweden where he travelled around without a steady employment, at times living as a vagabond on country roads. In the city of Malmö, at the age of 21, he was arrested for vagrancy.

In 1929, he debuted as a poet. Together with Artur Lundkvist, Gustav Sandgren, Erik Asklund and Josef Kjellgren he authored the anthology Fem unga (Five Youths), which introduced Swedish Modernism. His poetry combined an acute eye for, and love of nature, with a deeply-felt humanism. His popular success as a novelist came with the semi-autobiographical Nässlorna blomma (The Nettles Flower) in 1935, about hardships encountered by a young boy in the countryside. It has since been translated into more than thirty languages.

One of his most famous works is the poetic cycle Aniara, which is a story of the space craft Aniara that during a journey through space loses its course and subsequently floats on without destination. The book was published in (1956) and became in 1959 an opera composed by Karl-Birger Blomdahl. The cycle 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. The sensitive Harry found criticism in the 1970s after the Nobel prize hard to cope with, and attempted suicide with a pair of scissors. He died of February 11, 1978, at the Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm.

The 100th anniversary of Martinson's birth was celebrated around Sweden in 2004.