A dominant figure in Scandinavian literature of the twentieth century, the Swede Per Olov Enquist, died at the age of 85. Throughout his career, he has produced a powerful work by plunging into the shadows of History and his own biography, melancholy and thunderous.

Novelist, playwright, journalist, essayist, Per Olov Enquist died Saturday night, his family and publisher announced. His writings have been translated into dozens of languages, from L'oeil de cristal  published in 1961 to the Book of Parables  in 2013. In French, Le Cinquième Hiver du magnetétisseur , Hess , Le Départ des musicians , L'Ange fallen , The Library of Captain Nemo , Blanche and Marie .

"Few have inspired so many other writers"

His novel on the madness of King Christian VII of Denmark, The King's Personal Doctor , earned him the August prize in 1999, the highest Swedish literary award, and in 2001 in France the prize for the best foreign book. He gained international recognition in 1968 with The Extradition of the Baltics , a charge investigation against Sweden which, in the aftermath of the Second World War, returned soldiers from the Baltic refugee countries to the Soviet Union.

Often cited among the favorites of the Nobel Prize in Literature awarded by the Swedish Academy, he died without having won the prestigious award. "Few are those who have inspired so many other writers, renewed like him the documentary novel and vitalized the Swedish dramatic art", reacted Sunday their Swedish editors of the house Norstedts.

"I believe that all my life I wanted to be a writer"

His autobiography Another Life , published in Sweden in 2008, was crowned with a second August prize, created in 1994 in tribute to August Strindberg, the terrible child of Swedish literature to whom "POE" said so much duty. The author narrates his lonely youth in the far north of Sweden with his teacher mother, widow, hard-working Lutheran who dreamed of the seminar for him.

He narrowly misses qualification for the Olympic Games in Rome in 1960 and finds himself, as a journalist, in the heart of the 1972 Olympics in Munich where eleven Israeli athletes are killed by the Palestinian commando "Black September". "I believe that all my life I wanted to be a writer and I never gave up. It was not easy to survive ...", told Enquist to AFP in 2011.