Dan Andersson

Dan Andersson (Skattlösberg, 1888 – Stockholm, 1920) was a Swedish poet, storyteller and composer who wrote in Swedish. He is counted among the early proletarian writers of Sweden, though his work reaches well beyond that label. Today he is remembered above all for his poems and songs, many of which are still sung in Swedish homes more than a century after they were written.

Born in the province of Dalarna, he grew up in hard conditions in the village of Skattlösberg, in the so-called Finn Woods, where his paternal ancestors were Forest Finns who had settled to clear new land. His father was a village schoolteacher, and Andersson worked a series of odd jobs, including as a teacher, forestry labourer and charcoal maker, and he struggled to make a living. In 1902, at fourteen, he was sent to Minnesota to judge whether the family might emigrate; his letters home argued that America offered no better prospects than Sweden, and his father called him back.

Between 1911 and 1915 he lived with his parents and siblings at the Luossa cottage, where he wrote many of his stories and poems about charcoal burners, lumberjacks and fiddlers. His style is simple and rhythmic, with a strain of sentiment and a sympathy for ordinary people. He studied at the Brunnsvik folk high school in 1914–1915, alongside future writers, and later worked for the Social Democratic paper Ny Tid in Gothenburg. He set some of his own lyrics to music and played the accordion and violin. He also translated Rudyard Kipling and Charles Baudelaire into Swedish, and despite his humble upbringing he is generally regarded as remarkably well read.

He died in 1920, aged thirty-two, in a room at the Hotel Hellman in Stockholm, where he had gone to seek work. The hotel had used hydrogen cyanide against bedbugs without airing the room as required, and he was found dead that afternoon. His legacy is largely musical. His poems rank among the most popular in Swedish literature and have been set to music by more composers than any other Swedish poet of the twentieth century. In 2005 Sofia Karlsson recorded eleven of his songs on an album that won awards in Sweden and Denmark. Ludvika, where he is buried, holds an annual Dan Andersson week and a museum in his name, and Gothenburg has a bust of him.