Lars Gustafsson

Lars Gustafsson (1936–2016) was one of Scandinavia’s best-known authors. Born in Västerås, Sweden, in 1936, he published his first novel Vägvila: ett mysteriespel på prosa (Rest on the Way: A Mystery Play in Prose), at the age of twenety-one. His work won many awards, including the Prix Européen de l’Essai Charles Veillon (1983), the Swedish Academy’s Bellman Prize (1990), and the Swedish Pilot Prize (1996). His works are concerned with the search for moral consciousness and the relationship between personal experience and self-awareness, imbued with a philosophically-founded skepticism toward language. Between 1982 and 2004, Gustafsson taught philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin.