Karin (Maria) Boye - Career, Later life, Works

Poet and novelist, born in Göteborg, SW Sweden. She studied at Uppsala and Stockholm, and became a leader of the Socialist Clarté movement. She was the founder editor of the poetry magazine Spektrum (1931), to which she contributed much of her own poetry and translations. Her poetry collections include Moln (1922, Cloud), and De sju dödsynderna (1941, The Seven Deadly Sins), and she wrote several novels, including Kris (1934, Crisis) and Kallocain (1940).

Karin Maria Boye (help·info) (October 26, 1900 – April 24, 1941) was a Swedish poet and novelist.

Career

She was born in Gothenburg, Sweden and moved with her family to Stockholm in 1909. She studied at the university in Uppsala from 1921 to 1926 and debuted in 1922 with a collection of poems, "Clouds" (Sw. During her time in Uppsala and until 1930, Boye was a member of the socialist group Clarté.

In 1931 Boye, together with Erik Mesterton and Josef Riwkin, founded the poetry magazine Spektrum, introducing T.S.

Karin Boye is perhaps most famous for her poems, of which the most well-known ought to be "Yes, of course it hurts" (Sw. "I rörelse") from her collections of poems "The Hearths" (Sw.

Boye's novel "Crisis" (Sw. In her novels "Merit awakens" (Sw.

Outside Sweden, her best-known work is probably the novel "Kallocain".

Later life

Between 1929 and 1934 Boye was married to another Clarté member, Leif Björck. In 1932, after separating from her husband, she had a lesbian relationship with Gunnel Bergström, who left her husband, poet Gunnar Ekelöf, for Boye.

Boye died in an apparent suicide when swallowing sleeping-pills after leaving home on April 23, 1941.

Karin Boye was given two very different epitaphs. The best-known is the poem "Dead amazon" (Sw. Another poem was written by her close friend Ebbe Linde and is entitled "Dead friend" (Sw.

In 2004, one of the branches of the Uppsala University Library was named the Karin Boye Library (Karin Boye-biblioteket) in her honour. The literary association Karin Boye-sällskapet (the Karin Boye society) was founded in 1983 and is dedicated to contributing to keeping Karin Boye's work alive spreading it among new readers.

Works

Novels:

Astarte, 1931 Merit vaknar, 1933 Kris, 1934 För lite, 1936 Kallocain, 1940

Collections of poems:

Moln, 1922 Gömda land, 1924 Härdarna, 1927 För trädets skull, 1935 De sju dödssynderna, 1941 (not completed, posthumously published)