Author: Per Wästberg
 
  
Per Wästberg is Chairman of the Nobel Committee for Literature. He founded the Swedish Section of Amnesty International in 1963 and was deeply involved in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. From 1976 to 1982 he was the editor of Sweden's largest daily newspaper, Dagens Nyheter. He was president of International PEN from 1979 to 1986. He is the author of fifty publications, including novels, poetry, essays and works on African politics and literature.

 
Bibliography
2008 The Journey of Anders Sparrman
'What can one say about a work of literature unlike any one has read before? In a long life of reading I have never encountered anything quite like this sweepingly original symbiosis of scientific knowledge and curiosity, sensuality, narrative of human ethos and personality, research into form and significance of nature, written with thrilling grace. Not only is Per Wästberg a profound thinker who has followed in our times and world a roving, engaged drive which has led him to this creation of a novel which is also a biography (or is it a biography which is also a novel) he has been enabled to achieve this because he is himself a poet, with the poet's endowment of capturing in words what would seem out of their reach. In this account of Anders Sparrman, no figment of imagination but a Swedish explorer in the eighteenth century, to turn the pages is not only to follow Anders' perilous journeys with Captain Cook, and his own in Africa, it is to experience - this is what it would have been for me to see, with the perception sharpened as student-disciple of Linnaeus, what no one outside the Antarctic or interior of ancient Africa had ever seen before. And that, in its genre, is what this book is: what no one has discovered the way to write before'
- Nadine Gordimer
'Per Wästberg has written a winner with The Journey of Anders Sparman ... Wästberg's beautiful prose takes you on an immense journey capturing the almost mystical experience that early explorers must have had. It's a brilliantly researched adventure story and the writing is sublime'
- Patrick Neale, Bookseller
‘Wästberg evokes the landscape, and the sights, smells and texture of daily life, both in Sweden and on Sparrman's travels, with lyrical precision. It's a breathtaking endeavour - an attempt not just to capture a life that history reveals only in glimpses, but a whole universe ... As a historical chronicle, the novel can't be faulted’
- Christina Patterson, Independent