Barbro Alving (12 January 1909 – 22 January 1987) was a Swedish journalist and writer, a pacifist and feminist. She is widely known for writing under her pseudonym Bang. She wrote for, among others, the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter and the magazines Idun and Vecko-Journalen. She reported from various scenes during the Spanish Civil War, World War II and the Cold War.[1][2]
Alving was born in Uppsala, the daughter of Fanny Alving and Hjalmar Alving. Her father was a teacher of Nordic literature[3] and her mother was a writer.[2] She later moved with her family to Stockholm. Alving never married, but she had a daughter Maud Fanny Alving with illustrator and artist Birger Lundquist in 1938. Maud, better known as Ruffa Alving-Olin, is herself a journalist, and has collected and published letters, notes and other materials after Barbro Alving's death.[1] Alving began living with Anna Laura Sjöcrona when her daughter Ruffa was only one year old, forming "a different kind of family", in her daughter's words. Alving and Sjöcrona lived together for over 40 years, until Alving's death.
She was editorial secretary of Idun from 1928 to 1931, and then a journalist at Dagens Nyheter from 1934 to 1959. She reported from the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, from the Spanish Civil War, and the Winter War in Finland in 1939-40, from Norway in 1940, and Hungary in 1956. As a foreign correspondent, she reported from the United States, Vietnam, Africa and the Far East over a number of years.
She became a pacifist, and converted to Catholicism in 1959. She supported the campaign in the 1950s to prevent Sweden acquiring nuclear weapon. Because of her convictions, she left Dagens Nyheter, whose editor-in-chief was positive to a Swedish nuclear defense, and started working at Vecko-Journalen instead.[4] She refused to participate in civil defense, and was jailed for one month. She wrote of her period in prison in her 1956 book Dagbok från Långholmen (Diary of Långholmen) (1956).
She was inspired as a journalist, feminist and pacifist by Elin Wägner. She collected biographical material after Wagner's death in 1949, which later became a biography written by Ulla Isaksson and Erik Hjalmar Linder.
She wrote numerous books, some under the pseudonym "Käringen mot strömmen" ("old woman against the current", alluding to a 12th century Swedish proverb). She wrote several screenplays, and was awarded the Nios Grand Prize in 1975. The feminist magazine Bang is named after her.