Sven Lindqvist

Sven Lindqvist in 2005

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.[1][2]

Sven Lindqvist was born in Stockholm in 1932.[3] 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.[3] In 1960–1961, he worked as cultural attaché at the Swedish embassy in Beijing, China. From 1956–86 he was married to Cecilia Lindqvist, with whom he had two children.[3] In 1986 he married the economist Agneta Stark.[3][4] He lives in the Södermalm area of central Stockholm.[4]

Literary production

Lindqvist has written more than thirty books of essays, aphorisms, autobiography, documentary prose, travel and reportage.[3][4] He occasionally publishes articles in the Swedish press, writing for the cultural supplement of the largest Swedish daily, Dagens Nyheter, since 1950.[5] 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: essays, documentary prose, travel writing and reportages.[4] 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, Linqvist 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." [6]

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. In 1992, Lindqvist was embroiled in heated public debate, when his book Exterminate all the Brutes was attacked for its treatment of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Opponents accused Lindqvist of reducing the extermination of the Jewish people to a question of economical and social forces, thereby disregarding the impact of Nazi ideology and anti-Semitism and what they viewed as the unique historical specificity of the Holocaust. Some of the harshest attacks were launched by Per Ahlmark, who declared Lindqvist to be a "Holocaust revisionist". This prompted a furious response by Lindqvist, who considered it a defamatory smear—at no point had he ever called into question the Nazi responsibility for, or the number of dead in, the Holocaust. Regarding the original dispute, Lindqvist retorted that his main argument was correct: 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. However, he agreed that the long tradition of anti-Semitism in European and Christian thought had given the anti-Jewish campaign of the Nazis a further ideological dimension, and amended later editions of the book to better reflect this.

Awards and honors

Works

In English

Works in Swedish

References

  1. ↑ Mats Bigert (Summer 2003). "Bombs Away: An Interview with Sven Lindqvist". Cabinet (11). Retrieved July 12, 2011.
  2. ↑ George Monbiot (16 December 2003). "A weapon with wings". The Guardian. Retrieved July 12, 2011.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 "Sven Lindqvist official website". Archived from the original on June 25, 2014. Retrieved June 21, 2012.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 Stuart Jeffries (22 June 2012). "Sven Lindqvist: a life in writing". The Guardian. Retrieved 22 June 2012.
  5. ↑ Jenny Leonardz (February 2, 2008). "Sven Lindqvist har många böcker kvar". SvD (in Swedish). Retrieved June 21, 2012.
  6. ↑ Sven Lindqvist, The Myth of Wu Tao-Tzu. (London: Granta, 2012), p. 1

External links