Per Olov Enquist
Per Olov Enquist (born September 23, 1934, Hjoggböle, Sweden—died April 25, 2020, Vaxholm) was a Swedish writer and social critic of the who is considered one of the giants of contemporary Swedish literature. His works, which garnered him prestigious awards such as the August Prize and the Nordic Council Literature Prize, include novels, plays, screenplays, and essays.
Enquist grew up in an isolated community roughly 300 miles (480 km) south of the Arctic Circle. His laborer father, Elof Enquist, died when Per Olov was an infant. His mother, Maria (née Lindgren) Enquist, was a schoolteacher and a strict Evangelical. In his award-winning memoir, Ett annat liv (2008; literally, “A Different Life” but translated in English as The Wandering Pine), he recalled that she often pressured him to invent sins for confession. Enquist studied literature at Uppsala University and began writing professionally as a freelance journalist. He was also an excellent athlete in track-and-field sports, reportedly almost qualifying to compete in the high jump at the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome.
Enquist’s first novels, Kristallögat (1961; “The Crystal Eye”) and Färdvägen (1963; “The Route Travelled”), reflect his aesthetic interest in the form of the novel and the influence of the French new novel. As the political climate of the 1960s changed, Enquist moved from a liberal viewpoint to a socialist position. He began to take a documentary approach in both his novels and dramas. This technique, with its quasi-scholarly method, first became noticeable in Hess (1966) and was carried out with great effectiveness in Legionärerna (1968; The Legionnaires, 1973), a study of the extradition of Baltic soldiers from Sweden to the Soviet Union after the end of World War II. A year later the book was awarded the Nordic Council Literature Prize.
His novel Musikanternas uttåg (1978; The March of the Musicians) deals with early unionizing efforts in his native county of Västerbotten. His most successful drama, Tribadernas natt (1975; The Night of the Tribades, 1977), presents Enquist’s analysis of August Strindberg’s marital relationship. In 1999 he published Livläkarens besök (The Royal Physician’s Visit, 2001), a historical novel about sexual and political intrigue in 18th-century Denmark. It became his best-known work among American readers, and it won the August Prize, a literary award annually bestowed by the Swedish Publishers’ Association. Enquist received the August Prize again in 2008 for Ett annat liv.
Enquist also wrote scripts for film and television. Notably, he cowrote the screenplay for Pelle erobreren (1987; Pelle the Conqueror), a Danish film starring Max von Sydow that in 1989 won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film.