Klas Östergren

Who is Klas Östergren?

Klas Östergren is a Swedish novelist, screenwriter and translator who, in 1999, was nominated for his country's top film award, the Guldbagge and, in 2005, received the grand prize bestowed by the country's premier literary society, Samfundet De Nio.

A native of Stockholm, Klas Östergren was twenty years old when his first novel, Attila, was published in 1975, and gained critical acclaim and high readership five years later with the novel, Gentlemen. As a writer of screenplays and teleplays, he was honored in 1999 when Veranda för en tenor [Waiting for the Tenor], the screen treatment of his novel, Med stövlarna på och andra berättelser, was nominated for Sweden's equivalent of the Academy Award, the Guldbagge. He is also one of his country's most highly regarded literary translators, having published a Swedish-language version of J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye and also having translated a two-volume edition of the plays of Henrik Ibsen.

From 1982 to 1989, Klas Östergren was married to Swedish actress, Pernilla Wallgren, who subsequently continued her career using the name, Pernilla Östergren. They became the parents of a daughter, Agnes, and following their divorce and her marriage to director Bille August, she appeared, using her new professional name, Pernilla August, in two films for which Östergren wrote the screenplays. The first, 1996's Jerusalem, adapted from the novel by Selma Lagerlöf, was directed by her husband, Bille August, and the other, Offer och gärningsmän, was a 1999 miniseries directed for Sweden's national television broadcaster, SVT, by Tomas Alfredson.