Harry MartinsonArticle Free Pass Harry Martinson, in full Harry
Edmund Martinson (born May 6, 1904, Jämshög, Swed.—died Feb. 11,
1978, Stockholm), Swedish novelist and poet who was the first
self-taught, working-class writer to be elected to the Swedish
Academy (1949). With Eyvind Johnson he was awarded the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1974. Martinson spent his childhood in a
series of foster homes and his youth and early adulthood as a
merchant seaman, labourer, and vagrant. His first book of
poetry, Spökskepp (“Ghost Ship”), much influenced by Rudyard
Kipling’s Seven Seas, appeared in 1929. His early experiences
are described in two autobiographical novels, Nässlorna blomma
(1935; Flowering Nettle) and Vägen ut (1936; “The Way Out”), and
in original and sensitive travel sketches, Resor utan mål (1932;
“Aimless Journeys”) and Kap Farväl (1933; Cape Farewell). Among
his best-known works are Passad (1945; “Trade Wind”), a
collection of poetry; Vägen till Klockrike (1948; The Road), a
novel that sympatheticall