Horace Engdahl

Horace Engdahl ( pronunciation: [ ˌ hɔɹ ː as ɛn ː dɑ ː l], born 30 December 1948 in Karlskrona ) is a Swedish literary scholar, critic, essayist and translator, who held the post of Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy from 1999 to 2009. Engdahl is married since 1989 with Ebba Witt - Brattström, a well-known feminist and professor of literature.

1987 doctorate Engdahl, while already an established name as a critic, at Stockholm University with a thesis on the Swedish romance. He did however continue worked mainly as a freelance essayist and as a critic in the daily Dagens Nyheter, before he became a professor of Scandinavian literature at the Danish University of Aarhus, 2004. In addition, Engdahl was also active as a translator; among other things he translated Heinrich von Kleist's Amphitryon and Penthesilea into Swedish.

In the Swedish Academy Engdahl was elected in 1997, and in 1999 he took over the office of the Permanent Secretary by Sture Allén. In this role, Horace Engdahl announced in October each year the names of Nobel Prize winner for literature. He is fluent in German, English, French and Russian.

June 1, 2009 Engdahl gave his position as secretary to the historian Peter Englund. But Engdahl remains an ordinary member of the committee with voting rights.