Some people can does not die. They consist of so much life that it is impossible.
I cling to that thought when I on Saturday morning greeted by the news that the author Birgitta Stenberg has died during the night, 82 years old, after a period of struggle against cancer. Then I still have just recently read a nice, long interview in which she admittedly is very sick but seems very much alive.
“A rare bird in our thrumming and småpryda culture,” wrote a critic when her pioneering, famous autobiographical suite began to be issued, the one that began with Love in Europe in 1981 and ended with the sixth Eldar and ice, 2010 Ever since his debut with the novel, Michael and poet, in 1956, dared Birgitta Stenberg choose other – wilder – roads than they Most of us so meekly trot on.
When I met her in when she got Selma Lagerlof’s Literature Prize in 2005, she saw the heavy award as proof that she was no longer what she called the gravel in the shoe as a writer: “That I get to sit here and accept the award shows that I’m not bothering anymore. I have done all my life, so it feels a little strange. This is wonderful for the environment that we have come this far, but for me it will be a new role. There was a price she got for her as Selma Lagerlof dared to face the world and see without judging. “
Birgitta Stenberg is an example of immeasurable importance – especially for young feminists. She seems to have dared and done almost everything.
Birgitta Stenberg is an example of immeasurable importance – especially for young feminists. She seems to have dared and done it all: a very young cast out into Europe, survived the wild, bohemian life; in Paris, in Mallorca, everywhere. Explored drugs, sexuality, love. Lived as a fisherman with her husband on the island Åstol in Bohuslän, doing beekeeping, campaigned to live in threesome … Always in symbiosis with the writing. The autobiographical suite, life project, made her ever-ready, all that happened to be written, it could be the seed for a new book
In an interview in 2011, before her radio show author colleague and close friend Marta Tikkanen, she said, apropos of that she was done with her suite, she saw it as his duty in the world to explain how things stood: It feels really good to now be completely free. I no longer have to wonder if some replicas I hear can be used in a book.
That was one of the times I interviewed her. Like her books was a conversation with her is always exhilarating, as to be filled with wisdom of life adjusted for moralizing. Called to her husband always got a different answer than from others, as in 2007 when many thought that the literary debate in connection with, among other things, Maja Lundgren mosquitos and tigers, become gossipy and thin. “It’s always fun when something happens and the fracas and tjafsen shows you we writers live,” said Birgitta Stenberg.
It is for the autobiographical the suite she will mainly be remembered . But she has also written about such as beekeeping, islands, grief and cuisine. And for children, in the popular books about Billy. Nothing seems to have been alien to her.
In the last interview, the magazine we read, she explained that she was not afraid to die, so in typical Stenbergskt way: If some billions of people before us have dared to die well then every single person who you know also dare it? But one thing bothered. It’s a little smoldering for I will not be able to write about it. However, such risks may be taken.
Nah, just that if there must we may not read. But happily, she finished just a new book, with articles, short stories and poems that will be published in the autumn. The title is write me out of the world. When switching out “of” with “in”, we summarize the whole Birgitta Stenberg’s life.
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