Harry Martinson

Harry Edmund Martinson was born on May 6, 1904, in Jämshög, Blekinge. Abandoned in childhood upon his father's death, he was auctioned off by the parish as an orphan farmhand, an agonizing upbringing he chronicled with tender lyrical genius in his classic novels Nässlorna blomma (Flowering Nettle, 1935) and Vägen ut (The Way Out).

Running away to sea at age sixteen, Martinson worked as a sailor and stoker across the world before emerging as a major modernist poet in the 'Fem unga' group. In 1956, horrified by atomic testing and Cold War hubris, he composed Aniara, a visionary 103-canto epic space poem about a spacecraft carrying 8,000 survivors of a radioactive Earth knocked off course into infinite cosmic void. In 1974, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature jointly with Eyvind Johnson.