Harry Martinson was born in the southern Swedish province of Blekinge in1904. He was a highly prolific, self-taught working class novelist and poet who became one of the most important figures of Swedish proletarian literature. Like Melville and Conrad, he spent many years at sea, working as a deckhand, coal stoker, coaltrimmer, and laborer on nineteen different ships. In 1974, he shared the Nobel Prize for Literature with Swedish novelist and short story writer, Eyvind Johnson. Martinson died in 1978 in Stockholm.
