Name Sven Lindqvist Awards Dobloug Prize - Sweden Movies The Guardian Angel | Education Stockholm University Role Author | |
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Spouse Agneta Stark (m. 1986), Cecilia Lindqvist (m. 1956–1986) Books Exterminate All the Brutes, A History of Bombing, Desert Divers, The Myth of Wu Tao‑tzu, The Skull Measurer's Mistake Similar People Cecilia Lindqvist, Agneta Stark, Vilhelm Ekelund, Suzanne Osten | ||
Payot - Marque Page - Sven Lindqvist - Le voyage saharien
Sven Lindqvist (born April 28, 1932) is a Swedish author of mostly non-fiction, whose works include Exterminate All the Brutes and A History of Bombing.
Contents
- Payot Marque Page Sven Lindqvist Le voyage saharien
- Literary production
- Awards and honors
- In English
- Works in Swedish
- References
Sven Lindqvist was born in Stockholm in 1932. He holds a PhD in History of literature from Stockholm University (his thesis, in 1966, was on Vilhelm Ekelund) and a 1979 honorary doctorate from Uppsala University. In 1960–1961, he worked as cultural attaché at the Swedish embassy in Beijing, China. From 1956–86 he was married to the sinologist Cecilia Lindqvist, with whom he had two children. In 1986 he married the economist Agneta Stark. He lives in the Södermalm area of central Stockholm.
Literary production
Lindqvist has written more than thirty books of essays, aphorisms, autobiography, documentary prose, travel and reportage. He occasionally publishes articles in the Swedish press, writing for the cultural supplement of the largest Swedish daily, Dagens Nyheter, since 1950. He is the recipient of several of Sweden's most prestigious literary and journalistic awards.
His work is mostly non-fiction, including (and often transcending) several genres: essay, documentary prose, travel writing and reportage. He is known for his works on developing nations in Africa and the Saharan countries, China, India, Latin America and Australia. In the 1960s, partly inspired by the works of Hermann Hesse, Lindqvist spent two years in China. He became fascinated by the legend of the Tang dynasty painter, Wu Tao Tzu, who, when standing looking at a mural of a temple he had just completed, "suddenly clapped his hands and the temple gate opened. He went into his work and the gates closed behind him."
His later works, from the late 1980s, tend to focus on the subjects of European imperialism, colonialism, racism, genocide and war, analysing the place of these phenomena in Western thought, social history and ideology. These topics are not uncontroversial. His 1992 book Exterminate all the Brutes argued that the Nazi quest for Lebensraum had at its core been an application of the expansionist and racist principles of imperialism and colonialism, but for the first time applied against fellow Europeans rather than against the distant and dehumanized peoples of the Third World. The book encouraged historians to research the effect of atrocities in colonial times on Nazi thought.