Per Olov Enquist, Swedish literary giant who wove history into novels, dies at 85

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For more than five decades, Per Olov Enquist said, he was caught in a “black hole” that ate up his life, even as he became one of Scandinavia’s most celebrated authors.

Raised in the far north of Sweden, in a home dominated by “God and melancholy,” he was haunted by a father he never knew, a stillborn brother whose bed he slept in as a boy and memories of a strict evangelical mother who pushed him to invent sins for confession.

In his 20s, he narrowly missed qualifying for the 1960 Rome Olympics as a high jumper. In 1972, he went to Munich to report on the Summer Games as a journalist, only to end up covering a terrorist attack in which 11 members of the Israeli team were taken hostage and massacred.

Mr. Enquist battled depression and then alcoholism, falling into despair while his works were translated into more than 20 languages. He ultimately stopped drinking and came to terms with his past through writing, notably through an autobiographical novel, “A Different Life” (2008), that he wrote in the third person “out of honesty,” fearing that a more traditional memoir might have obscured the truth.

The result, chronicling the years before his newfound sobriety and “rebirth” in 1990, joined his “egocentric bookshelf” at home, a wall-spanning collection of his novels, plays, fairy tales and poetry collections. “Every time I feel depressed that I’m not doing anything,” he told Agence France-Presse, “I look at this bookshelf and say to myself, ‘Well, that is seven meters and I have done a little bit, so I can die.’ ”

Mr. Enquist was 85 when he died April 25 in Vaxholm, Sweden, on an island outside Stockholm. His death was confirmed by Katarina Lindell, a spokeswoman for his publisher Norstedts, who did not give a precise cause. Aftonbladet, a Swedish newspaper, reported that he had a stroke in 2016 and had undergone at least two heart surgeries.

“P.O. Enquist’s importance for Swedish cultural life since the 1960s can’t be exaggerated,” Björn Wiman, culture editor of Stockholm’s Dagens Nyheter newspaper, wrote on Sunday. “He was the model for the socially engaged poet who influenced generations of younger writers. It is empty and unthinkable that he is gone.”

While Mr. Enquist never acquired the American renown of Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose best-selling autobiographical novel “My Struggle” drew comparisons to “A Different Life” (also known as “The Wandering Pine”), he won a host of literary honors for his books, which blended deep historical research with elliptical storytelling and a dose of melancholy.

A friend of Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman and leaders of the country’s center-left Social Democratic Party, he won Sweden’s August Prize twice, for “Another Life” and “The Royal Physician’s Visit” (1999), which centered on the doctor of Denmark’s mad King Christian VII and his romance with the queen consort.

Mr. Enquist also won a Nordic Council Literature Prize for his World War II novel “The Legionnaires” (1968), about Baltic soldiers who were conscripted by the Germans, fled to Sweden and were deported after the war. In “The Book About Blanche and Marie” (2004), he explored the relationship between chemist and physicist Marie Curie and her assistant Blanche Wittman, who had been treated for “hysteria” and confined in an asylum for 16 years.

He also worked on nearly two dozen screenplays, including “August Strindberg” (1985), a six-part TV miniseries about Sweden’s most celebrated playwright, and the historical drama “Pelle the Conqueror” (1987), based on a novel by Martin Andersen Nexo. Directed by Danish filmmaker Bille August, who also worked on the screenplay, it starred Max von Sydow as an out-of-work Swede who immigrates to Denmark with his son, in search of a better life.

The movie won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival and earned the Academy Award for best foreign-language film, marking Mr. Enquist’s greatest film and theatrical success. He had previously landed on Broadway in 1977 with “The Night of the Tribades,” which dramatized the conflict between Strindberg, his estranged wife and a woman he suspected of stealing his wife.

Despite an all-star cast — Swedish actors Bibi Andersson and von Sydow were joined by Eileen Atkins and Werner Klemperer — the play closed after less than two weeks, “annihilated,” in Mr. Enquist’s view, by a scathing review in the New York Times.

“It is full of accurate documentation, even though the particular evening it depicts never took place, and it is much more narrative than it is dramatic,” wrote New York magazine theater critic John Simon, offering a more favorable view of the play. “Still, it is a work that makes us think about timely issues, such as feminism, and timeless ones, like marriage between two conflicting artistic temperaments (and, indirectly, any high-strung, independently ambitious people); what other plays on Broadway can claim as much?”

Mr. Enquist was born in Hjoggbole, a village on Sweden’s eastern coast, on Sept. 23, 1934. His father was a lumberjack who died when Per Olov was an infant; his mother was a schoolteacher who thrust the Bible on him from a young age, insisting he stay away from anything “ungodly.”

While her rules frustrated a young Mr. Enquist, he later credited his upbringing with helping to spark his devotion to books, one of the few sources of entertainment allowed at home. “I wouldn’t want to change it if I could,” he told the Guardian in 2016. “The children who were raised in secular families could go to the theater or the cinema. I couldn’t.”

Mr. Enquist was a literature student at Uppsala University when he wrote his first novel, “The Crystal Eye” (1961), about a young woman coming to terms with her past. After graduating, he worked as a book and theater critic at newspapers and published novels including “The Magnetist’s Fifth Winter” (1964), inspired by the life of Franz Mesmer, a 19th-century German doctor whose “animal magnetism” theory made him a New Age touchstone.

His marriages to Margareta Ersson and Lone Bastholm, a Danish actress and theater director, ended in divorce, and in 1995 he married Gunilla Thorgren, a journalist and politician. In addition to his wife, survivors include two children from his first marriage and eight grandchildren.

Mr. Enquist returned to memories of his adolescence with “The Parable Book” (2013), based on a teenage romance he had with a 51-year-old woman visiting his hometown. He said that he rewrote each chapter seven or eight times, cutting more than 2,500 pages from the manuscript in an approach that he likened to a hiker wandering through the wilderness.

“For the first month you don’t know where the paths go,” he told the Guardian, “but after three months you realize that you can’t get lost. That’s the feeling: that the forest has many alternatives, but you can’t take the wrong path.”