Karin Boye

Kris, published in 1934, follows Malin Forst, a student teacher in Stockholm who loses her religious certainty and falls in love with a female classmate. Boye drew hard on her own life for it. Born in Gothenburg in 1900 and living in Stockholm from the age of nine, she studied at Uppsala, made her debut with the poetry collection Moln in 1922, and in 1931 helped found the modernist review Spektrum with Erik Mesterton and Josef Riwkin, for which she put T. S. Eliot into Swedish. In Sweden she is read chiefly as a poet, while her reputation abroad rests on Kallocain (1940), set in a future state that reaches inside its citizens' thoughts. From 1934 she lived with Margot Hanel, whom she called her wife. She was found dead near Alingsås in late April 1941, aged 40. Amanda Doxtater's English translation of Kris appeared from Norvik Press in 2020.