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Per Olov Enquist (1934 - )
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Biography
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Per Olov Enquist was born in 1934 in the village of Hjoggböle in Northern Sweden. His father, Elof Enquist, a laborer who sometimes worked in the local sawmills and sometimes as a stevedore in shipyards miles from the family home, died when Per Olov was an infant. His mother, Maria Lindgren Enquist, a schoolteacher, raised him in this isolated, pious rural community where much of the family on both parents' sides had lived for generations. Enquist grew up there and did not leave until he had finished high school. This Northern Swedish environment, with its strong evangelical influences, has turned out to be not only the background for much of Enquist's fiction, but also the stimulus for his lifelong search for truth, a search that many of his characters and narratives exemplify. While the early emotional and financial hardships that Enquist experienced may have shaped his intellectual life, many of the philosophical problems and complex narrative structures that he has explored as a writer derive from or are related to the religious texts and debates to which he was exposed as a boy.
Enquist moved to Uppsala in 1955 and began his studies in literature at the university there. He completed his Filosofie Magister degree in 1960 and his Filosofie Licientat degree in 1966. During his years as a graduate student at Uppsala University, he began writing for Svenska Dagbladet and, remarkably, also completed his first two novels. His early novels reflect the influence of the French nouveau roman popular then, but they also anticipate the themes that will continue to wind through his fiction for the next forty years. A metafictional representation of the author and his connection to the events he describes occurs in many of Enquist's novels and plays, as does the search for truth, and the ability to find and accept one's emotional and intellectual identity. Deeply rooted in the social democratic history of Sweden, he has also played an active role as cultural critic and at times public gadfly. Related to this political consciousness are themes such as the temptation to withdraw from life and the necessity to participate actively in it.
Source: Ross Shideler (editor), Swedish Book Review, 2004 (www.swedishbookreview.com)
username July 6th, 2008 04:35 PM PST