Despite the universal themes in Lagerkvist's writings and his relative isolation from mainstream Swedish literary life--he never belonged to a literary group or movement--his keen awareness of contemporary trends, both literary and otherwise, is beyond dispute: his early poetry and plays established him as one of the foremost exponents of literary modernism in Sweden, while his literary activities of the 1930s announced him as one of the earliest and most uncompromising Swedish opponents of totalitarian movements in Europe. From the 1940s Lagerkvist's reputation grew both at home and abroad, and public and critical acclaim culminated in the early 1950s with the publication of his biblical novel Barabbas in 1950 and the award of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1951. By the mid 1960s Lagerkvist was one of the most widely translated Swedish writers of all time, with publications appearing in no fewer than thirty-four languages.
In the history of twentieth-century Swedish literature there are few prominent writers of whom as little was known during their lifetime as of Lager-kvist. An extremely private man who declined to speak publicly about either his life or his works, Lagerkvist claimed--at the time of the intense media interest surrounding his receiving of the Nobel Prize--that all he wanted to say could be found in his writing.
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