Published: 21 January 2011

Tomas Tranströmer was born in Stockholm in 1931 and died on 26^th March, 2015. His father was a journalist, but after his parents divorced he saw his father rarely. Tranströmer's mother was a teacher. In his childhood Tranströmer spent many summers on the island of Runmarö, and in his poetry collection Östersjöar (1974, Baltics) and memoir Minnena ser mig (1993) he also returned to its landscape.

Before Tranströmer became interested in music and painting, he was fascinated by archaeology and natural sciences and wanted to become an explorer. Tranströmer was educated at Södra Latin School, where he started to read and write poetry. In 1956 he received a degree in psychology from the University of Stockholm. He worked for the Psychotechnological Institute at the university, and in 1960 he became a psychologist at Roxtuna, an institution for juvenile offenders.

From the mid-1960s Tranströmer divided his time between his writing and his work as a psychologist. In 1965 he moved with his family to Västerås, a city about sixty miles west of Stockholm. After suffering a stroke in 1990, which deprived him of his speech and partly inhibited movement on his right-hand side, he moved back to Stockholm.

In 1990 Tranströmer received the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. His other awards include the Bonnier Award for Poetry, Germany's Petrarch Prize, Bellman Prize, The Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize, and August Prize. In 2011 he finally was awarded the Nobel Prize.

In 1997 the city of Västerås established a special Tranströmer Prize.

Published: 02 January 2011

Selma Lagerlöf was born on 20 November 1858 at Mårbacka in Värmland in western Sweden, an early sickness left her lame in both legs, although she later recovered. The sale of the estate following her father’s illness in 1884 had a serious impact on her development.

Lagerlöf worked as a country schoolteacher in Landskrona for nearly 10 years. She began her first novel, Gösta Berling’s Saga, while working as a teacher. In 1894 she met Sophie Elkan, also a writer, who became her friend and companion. Judging from letters between them, Lagerlöf fell deeply in love with her. By 1895, she gave up her teaching to devote herself to her writing. With the help of proceeds from Gösta Berling’s Saga and a scholarship and grant, she made two journeys to Italy, and also to Palestine and other parts of the East, which were largely instrumental in providing material for her next novel.

A 1900 visit to the American Colony in Jerusalem became the inspiration for Lagerlöf’s book by that name. However, most of Lagerlöf’s stories were set in Värmland. As a writer Selma Lagerlöf became most widely known for her children’s book Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige (The Wonderful Adventures of Nils), published as a school book in 1907.

In 1909 Selma Lagerlöf was the first female writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1914 she also became a member of the Swedish Academy. At the start of World War II, she sent her Nobel Prize medal and gold medal from the Swedish Academy to the government of Finland to help raise money to fight the Soviet Union. The Finnish government was so touched that it raised the necessary money by other means and returned her medal to her. In 1928, she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Greifswald. Selma Lagerlöf died on 16 March 1940 at Mårbacka estate which she had bought back with the Nobel Prize money.