Karin Boye

Karin Boye (1900-41), born in Sweden, was a poet and anti-Fascist who translated The Waste Land into Swedish. After undergoing psychoanalysis in Berlin, she left her husband and formed a lifelong relationship with another woman, Margot Hanel. Her most famous book, Kallocain (1940), was partly inspired by eye-opening trips to Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Boye committed suicide the year after writing the novel.

David McDuff‘s translations for Penguin Classics include Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot, and Babel’s short stories.