Karin Boye, Sweden's greatest woman poet, is one of the trio of
great Scandinavian women poets, along with Edith Södergran and Mirjam
Tuominen - all three published in English by Bloodaxe Books. Born in 1900,
she was a poet of ideas, and wrote a powerful prophetic novel,
Kallocain. Her involvement in the radical literary and artistic
movement Clarté during the 1920s led to her interest in
psychoanalysis, which influenced her literary work as well as her personal
development during the latter years of her life. Intellectually and
emotionally, she was far ahead of her time, and her controversial writings
included the novel Crisis, in which she depicted the religious
turmoil of her adolescence and her discovery of her own bisexuality. Her
poetry has a strenuously angular quality which reflects - with naked
candour - the harsh realities of her tragic inner struggle, which was
eventually to lead to her suicide in 1941.