Harry Martinson

Martinson was born 6 May 1904 and spent years at sea before turning to writing, bringing what critics called a proletarian edge to Swedish verse. By 1949 the establishment had claimed him: he was elected to the Swedish Academy. In 1956 he published Aniara, a poetic narrative of a spacecraft lost in the void, which became an opera three years later with music by Karl-Birger Blomdahl; the cycle has been read as a story of human fragility and folly. Then came 1974, when the Academy gave him and fellow member Eyvind Johnson a shared Nobel Prize "for writings that catch the dewdrop and reflect the cosmos." The decision drew immediate controversy - both laureates sat on the body that had chosen them. Martinson died 11 February 1978.