The Unlikely Posthumous Life of a Prodigy’s Typewriter
by Diego Courchay excerpt published in The Delacourte Review in collaboration with LitHub I first came across Stig Dagerman and his books sometime in the first months of 2011, in the foreign language section at Dussmann’s bookstore, on the Friedrichstraße, shortly after moving to Berlin. The city lent itself to long conversations about history and politics, […]
Anita on Stig
I got to know Stig in 1947 when his first drama The Condemned was being staged at the Dramatic Theater in Stockholm. He actively participated in rehearsals and spent a lot of time at the theater and we, who rehearsed other plays, always ran into him in corridors, stairs and in the canteen. At 25, Stig was […]
To Dialogue with Dagerman
By Bengt Söderhäll, lecturer, poet, musician and chair of the Stig Dagerman Society, Sweden. “There is nothing like it in Swedish literature. Its closest relative is Kafka or Camus.” Pontus Stenshall, Director, on Dagerman’s novel The Island of the Doomed Moment Theater, located in the outskirts of Stockholm, recently had the world premiere of their staging of […]
Writer’s Role: To Build Bridges And Break Glass
“As a bridge builder, I am fascinated by the solutions to three main problems: First, there is the problem of connection. I hope to be able to break my own isolation by having one support secured within myself; the other will be found within those people to whom I turn […]
Reading ISLAND OF THE DOOMED
Dagerman’s second novel was written right before his journey to Germany in the fall of ’46. Its structure is bursting at the seams with over-heated, hallucinatory imagery, the unfettered flow of which is unique in his production. (Dagerman’s reporting from Germany signaled a turn toward more naturalistic, and to many readers, more accessible writing.) It […]
Island of the Doomed Reviewed
Frederic Lindsay, The Scotsman, April 18, 1992 “ANGUISH PLAYED OUT IN A SURREAL LANDSCAPE Born in 1923, by the time he was 26, the Swedish writer Stig Dagerman had published four novels, a short story collection, a brilliant book-length report of the condition of Germany in the broken years immediately following defeat, and four plays. in 1954, he […]
Reading A BURNT CHILD
PURITY IS A HARD TASK MASTER by Brita Green, Ph.D. I don’t remember exactly what year it was when we, a group of young Swedes, all read Stig Dagerman and in particular his novel A Burnt Child, but it would have been some-time in the early 1950’s. We were a dozen or so school friends of […]
In the Forest of Paradoxes
J.M.G. Le Clezio Extract from J.M.G. Le Clezio’s Nobel Lecture December 7, 2008 Shortly before I received the—to me, astonishing—news that the Swedish Academy was awarding me this distinction, I was re-reading a little book by Stig Dagerman that I am particularly fond of: a collection of political essays entitled La Dictature de chagrin (The Dictatorship […]
Meeting Stig
By Michael Meyer, from his introduction to The Games of Night, 1959. I first saw Stig Dagerman in 1948, when he came to speak in a debate at Uppsala University. He was then 25 years old and already had three novels, three plays, a book of travel reportage and a collection of short stories to his credit. […]
Stig Into Turkish
by Halil Gôkhan, Writer and Editor of KAFEKÜLTÜR in IstanbulIf I remember correctly, the first time I heard Stig Dagerman`s name was in 2005 when I learnt that the Turkish writer and journalist Yasar Kemal had received an award from the Swedish Stig Dagerman Society. Kemal got this award in 1997 with the motivation that he had used […]