Karin Boye (1900 – 1941) One of Sweden’s greatest poets, melancholy and vulnerable with a yearning for another deeper dimension of life, seemingly lost to her generation. She was also a sharp eyed critic and thinker engaged in the political debates of the 1930’s. Her novel Kallocain was written during the darkest age of Europe marked by Nazism and Stalinism. In it she describes the very essence of the totalitarian state and what it does to Mankind. She committed suicide in 1941.