Kristian Lundberg made his debut in 1991 with the collection of poems "Through September".
He was then a member of the Malmö League, a group of young poets, all men, who wanted to profile themselves against what they perceived as academic poetry and instead open the poem to the experiences of the marginalized, it could be about social or geographical exclusion.
Kristian Lundberg identified with both.
In his very extensive writing, he remained faithful to Malmö and moved to the bottom of the bitter shafts, among those who fear power, to speak with another poet, Cornelis Vreeswijk.
Lundberg left early poetry for a poetic prose
, he often wrote self-revealing - or self-mythologizing - and also published a handful of detective stories that showed a supreme contempt for the genre's unwritten rules, but in return directed a revealing light into the welfare state's dirtiest corners.
He got his public breakthrough (and a series of awards) in 2009 with "Yarden", in a year as an hourly employee in a rental company.
The renewed portrayal of workers, brought together fragments of a tradition, proletarian depictions of growing up and breaking up, class travel and workplace reporting into something new and frightening.
The narrator discovers in his bare body that the conditions for the day laborer have hardly improved;
the co-workers all have foreign names, they are undocumented, no union for their cause, no law enforcement agency looks after their interests, their bodies ache, the work clothes do not keep out cold or wet, yet a hellish day at the Yard is better than a day without work.
Kristian Lundberg followed up "Yarden"
with the novel "And everything should be love" (2011) which tells the story once again, but this time the perspective is expanded to include the narrator's childhood with an absent father and sick mother, alcohol abuse and salvation.
The desperate struggle he had waged with himself for so long was at least temporarily reversed, and in his late writing Lundberg appeared as a devout Christian.
Now he no longer has to believe.