Verner von Heidenstam

Swedish poet and novelist Verner von Heidenstam was born in Orebro, Sweden, in 1859. His family came from a long line of Swedish nobility, and had a tradition of service in the country's diplomatic corps and military. As a child he was rather sickly and in poor health, and spent much time reading, his favorite subjects being poetry and epic, heroic tales. He began his higher education in Stockholm, but his ongoing health problems forced him to leave school in 1876, and he left Sweden for warmer climes to recuperate. He stayed away for eight yeas, traveling to France, Italy, Germany and Asia. In 1881 he traveled to Paris, France, and studied art at the prestigious Ecole des Beaux Arts. He had married a Swiss girl, much to the disapproval of his family, in 1880 and he and his family were estranged for the next seven years, until they reunited at his father's deathbed in 1887. He published his first collection of poems, "Pilgrimage: The WanderYears", in 1888. It included some works about his travels in the Orient--a subject which was to infuse a lot of his work--and in 1889 he turned out a novel, "Endymion", which also recounted his experiences traveling in Asia. In 1893 his wife died, and in 1896 he remarried again, but the marriage didn't last long and ended in divorce. In 1899 he was elected to the distinguished Gotenburg Academy of Sciences and Letters, and in that same year he married for the third time, to a woman almost 20 years younger than he. He bought an estate in the Swedish countryside, and not long afterward began publishing a string of novels about his favorite childhood subject, epic tales of heroism and bravery, this time based on ancient Swedish and Scandinavian history. In 1915 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his novel "Nya Dikter". He died in Stockholm, Sweden, aged 80, on May 20, 1940.