Novelist, poet, and essayist Lars Gustafsson was born in Västerås, Sweden, on May 17, 1936. He recalls in his notebooks that he felt isolated in his early school years, since he was already thinking about the serious issues in human life and society. He wanted to be a poet from the age of fourteen. Leaving Västerås in 1955, he studied philosophy, aesthetics, sociology, and literature at the University of Uppsala, and in 1957, he received a scholarship to study at Magdalene College of Oxford University. This was also the year in which his first published prose work appeared. This was Vägvila: Ett mysteriespel på prosa: Till det förflutna och minnet av vindar (Rest at the Roadside: A Mystery Play in Prose: To the Past and the Memory of Winds). His first novel, Poeten Brumbergs sista dagar och...