Pär Lagerkvist

Pär Fabian Lagerkvist was born on 23 May 1891 and began writing in his early twenties with an expressive power that would carry him into his late seventies. He worked across poetry, plays, novels, short stories, and essays, all marked by a single preoccupation: the problem of good and evil. He reached for religious figures - Barabbas, freed in place of Christ; Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew - and stripped them from church doctrine to make them his own moral instruments. The Nobel committee gave him the Literature Prize in 1951. He died on 11 July 1974, having spent a lifetime asking the question he never pretended to answer.