Sven Lindqvist


Sven Oskar Lindqvist was a Swedish author of mostly non-fiction, whose works include Exterminate All the Brutes and A History of Bombing.
Svenska Dagbladet described him as one of the most important authors in modern Swedish literature.

Biography

Sven Lindqvist was born in Stockholm in 1932. He held a PhD in History of literature from Stockholm University and a 1979 honorary doctorate from Uppsala University. In 1960–1961, he worked as cultural attaché at the Swedish embassy in Beijing, China. From 1956 he was married to the sinologist Cecilia Lindqvist, with whom he had two children. In 1986 he married the economist Agneta Stark. He published some 35 books, mainly documentary essays and books along with travel writing. He lived in the Södermalm area of central Stockholm.
Lindqvist wrote more than thirty books of essays, aphorisms, autobiography, documentary prose, travel and reportage. He occasionally published articles in the Swedish press, writing for the cultural supplement of the largest Swedish daily, Dagens Nyheter, since 1950. He was the recipient of several of Sweden's most prestigious literary and journalistic awards. His works have been translated into English, Danish, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish among other languages. The books Exterminate all the Brutes and A Lover's Diary are included in Jan Gradvall's 2009 Tusen svenska klassiker. He died on 14 May 2019 at the age of 87.

Genres and themes

Lindqvist's work was mostly non-fiction, including several genres: essay, documentary prose, travel writing and reportage. He was 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, Lindqvist 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."
His later works, from the late 1980s, tended to focus on the subjects of European imperialism, colonialism, racism, genocide, degradation of the natural environment, and war, analysing the place of these phenomena in Western thought, social history and ideology.

Major works

''Terra Nullius''

Among Lindqvist's best-known works is his 2007 book Terra Nullius, about the impact of white settlers on the Australian landscape and its aboriginal population, combined with "often glorious" travel writing. Among the shocks to people and landscape are the British above-ground nuclear weapon tests of 1953 to 1963, leaving some 20 kilograms of plutonium dust spread over hundreds of miles of the land near Maralinga. Lindqvist remarks that the land will remain radioactive for at least 280,000 years, and notes that the weapons thus tested could "on a single order" turn the whole world into a Terra Nullius.

''Exterminate all the Brutes''

Lindqvist's favourite among his books was his 1996 Exterminate all the Brutes, first published in Swedish in 1992 as . Its title is taken from a phrase uttered by the murderous racist imperialist Mr Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's 1899 novella Heart of Darkness. As a boy, Lindqvist had seen a photograph of the emaciated corpses at Buchenwald concentration camp. He stated that the image of Nazi atrocity and the novella came together in his mind, and in Exterminate all the Brutes he argues that Hitler grew up in a time when the whole of the Western world was "soaked in the conviction" that imperialism was a biological necessity that inevitably destroyed "the lower races". Lindqvist argued controversially that this had already killed millions in genocides before Hitler's application of the principle to white people, and noted that his book had resulted in academic study of the "effect of colonial atrocities on Nazi crimes".

''A History of Bombing''

The book most admired by critics in English was his 2001 A History of Bombing. The book has a "fractured structure" with 399 short chapters or sections. Lindqvist described it as "a labyrinth with twenty-two entrances and no exit", an emblem of the disruption that bombing causes. Each section is numbered; many sections end with an arrow pointing to another number, sometimes far ahead in the book, sometimes back, forming a hypertext-like network. The book argues that bombing is driven by "the dream of exterminating from the air with minimal risk" to the bombing nation. Lindqvist argues, with detailed historical evidence, that this was effectively started by the British, who used the RAF to control inconvenient colonies in India, Afghanistan, Iraq, Kenya, Darfur, and Egypt, beginning in 1919.

Awards and distinctions

In English