Harry Martinson was born at Jämshög in
1904. He was left an orphan at an early age, and after a chequered childhood,
in which the children's homes and institutions were as numerous as the escapes,
he went to sea at the age of sixteen, spending six years of his life on board
various ships and as a workman in foreign countries.
It was from
these travels and years of work in environments of all kinds that he later drew
material and inspiration for his literary efforts - a couple of books of prose
with glimpses, views and memories of the world of coal-heated ships during the
1920s.
These accounts were followed a few years later by one or two
books with an autobiographical strain and fictional recollections of a boarded-out
child's existence, especially the child's own way of perceiving and trying to
understand life and the people in it.
Side by side with this psychological
cognition of the childhood land of memory, there appeared some collections of
poetry which were continued by degrees in a series of nature studies in prose,
in which words and observation are combined in what the author has called "thinking
out in the meadow".
In a later work, the novel Vägen till
Klockrike, the description of the human side is devoted entirely to the relationship
between the settled and the itinerant man within ourselves. A world of journeying
in a still wider sense emerges in Aniara, an epic work about an imagined
space flight with a perspective in depth towards our own time. In it, jostling
for room in our consciousness, are our fears and our questions as to where we
are heading, together with the planet that our generation is treating as it does.
Harry Martinson died in 1978.
From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1968-1980, Editor-in-Charge Tore Frängsmyr, Editor Sture Allén, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1993
This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.
Harry Martinson died on February 11, 1978.