ABSTRACT
HORACE ENGDAHL (B. 1948) IS A Swedish literary scholar and a member of the Swedish Academy, of which he served as the permanent secretary from 1999 to 2009. Prior to this he was culture editor at Sweden’s leading newspaper Dagens Nyheter and worked as an independent scholar outside of academia. During Engdahl’s tenure as secretary, the Nobel Prize was awarded to a number of writers who were politically controversial in their homelands, such as Turkey’s Orhan Pamuk and the exiled Chinese writer Gao Xingjian, in addition to authors who wrote literature which bears witness to traumatic events, for example Hungary’s Imre Kertész. His 2003 edited anthology Witness Literature includes a number of essays by Nobel laureates who refl ect on the role of literature in relation to history and memory, and in his introduction Engdahl refl ects on Elie Wiesel’s idea that testimonial literature is a new and important wave in world literature in the twentieth century.
