Klas Östergren is a Swedish novelist, screenwriter and translator. On 28 February 2014, the Swedish Academy announced that Östergren had been appointed a new member of the Academy, succeeding Ulf Linde on seat 11. Östergren will be formally installed as a member on 20 December 2014.
In 1999, he was nominated for his country's top film award, the Guldbagge Award and, in 2005, received the grand prize bestowed by the country's premier literary society, Samfundet De Nio.
A native of Stockholm, Klas Östergren was twenty years old when his first novel, Attila, was published in 1975, and gained critical acclaim and high readership five years later with the novel, Gentlemen. As a writer of screenplays and teleplays, he was honored in 1999 when Veranda för en tenor [Waiting for the Tenor], the screen treatment of his novel, Med stövlarna på och andra berättelser, was nominated for Sweden's equivalent of the Academy Award, the Guldbagge. He is also one of his country's most highly regarded literary translators, having published a Swedish-language version of J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye and also having translated a two-volume edition of the plays of Henrik Ibsen.
|