Niklas Rådström is one of Sweden's most noted and prolific contemporary poets, novellists and playwrights. He is the son of the author Pär Rådström and theater director Anne Marie Rådström.
Career
Rådström made his debut as a poet in 1975 and made a major breakthrough in 1979 with the poetry collectionPoems about the life of Sandro della Quercia, a lyrical biography of a fictional Renaissance artist. In the following decade, he consolidated his position as one of his generation's leading poets. In 1984 came his first full evening play, Hitler's Childhood, which premiered on Young Klara directed by Suzanne Osten and played in a number of sets around the world. As a screenwriter, he has also collaborated with Osten in the feature films Bröderna Mozart, and Talk! It's So Dark. In addition to working with Osten he has written the screenplay for Jan Troells Golden Globe-nominated film Everlasting Moments. With the full evening play On the way to the sea, 1998, Rådström returned to the theater and has since written a series of plays. Quartet, 1999, is a chamber play for four actors and a string quartet built around Dmitri Shostakovich's eighth string quartet and has been staged at, among others, Kungl. Dramatic Theater in Stockholm and De Konglige in Copenhagen. Rådström's play freely built on three censored chapters in Dostoevsky's novel The Evil Spirits, Long Silence. Suddenly Dark, 2002, won first prize in the Wilhelm Hansen Foundation's Nordic Drama Competition. Monsters, 2005, a play about the murder of two-year-old James Bulger by two 10-year-olds in Liverpool in 1993, has attracted international attention and has been played, among others venues, in the Netherlands and several times in England. In Walking Through a Mountain, 2007, Rådström describes in dramatic collage the mechanisms of depression and in the collaboration between four Danish theaters and the music group Middle EastPeace Orchestra, "The Other Dreams", 2009, the Israel-Palestine conflict. As a playwright, he has also done a number of major staging of literary works: Dante's Divine Comedy, 2004, the mastodont project The Bible, 2012, Don Quijote, 2013, and The Master and Margarita, 2014, after Mikhail Bulgakov's novel. His play for children The Earless Singer, 1997, based on a Japanese folk tale recorded by Lafcadio Hearn, has also become an opera with music by Gunnar Edander. As librettist he has worked with Thomas Jennefelt, Sport & Leisure, and the four-hour opera Book of Life, based on the Bible, with music by Sven-David Sandström, who managed to finished the composing just weeks before he died in the summer of 2019. Among Rådström's novels are The Moon doesn't know from 1976 and Medan tiden tänker på annat from 1992. At the 29th Guldbagge Awards Rådström was nominated for the award for Best Screenplay for the film Speak Up! It's So Dark. He was awarded the Dobloug Prize in 2008. Between 2012 and 2017, Rådström was a professor of narrative for stage, film and media at Stockholm Dramatic University. Since 2019 he has beens professor of creative writing at Linnaeus University. In October 2018, Niklas Rådström abstained from membership of the Swedish Academy.
