Harry Martinson

Harry Martinson (1904-1978) was a Swedish poet and novelist, orphaned young and later a sailor and vagrant, who depicted his harsh childhood and sea adventures in semi-autobiographical works like Flowering Nettle. He reformed 20th-century Swedish poetry, blending nature, humanism, science, and cosmic themes, with his most famous work Aniara (1956), an epic poem about a lost spaceship. Elected to the Swedish Academy in 1949, he shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in Literature with Eyvind Johnson.