Background
Sara Lidman was born on December 30, 1923, in Missentrask, Sweden. She was a daughter of Andreas and Jenny (née Lundman) Lidman.
752 36 Uppsala, Sweden
Sara studied at the University of Uppsala.
Sara Lidman was born on December 30, 1923, in Missentrask, Sweden. She was a daughter of Andreas and Jenny (née Lundman) Lidman.
To describe herself as "a pious child," Lidman grew up in a land far removed from the sophistication of Stockholm, and her isolation from the modern world was reinforced by the strict puritanical pietism of her conservative Lutheran parents and neighbors. A bout with tuberculosis in her early teens kept Lidman homebound for an extended period of time, and she became a voracious reader, immersing herself in works by Dostoyevsky and Kierkegaard as well as several Swedish regional novelists. At the same time, she began writing her own stories. Because of her fragile health, she continued her education through correspondence courses and completed her secondary education at a local private school. Sara studied at the University of Uppsala where her studies were interrupted when she contracted tuberculosis.
Moving to Stockholm in 1944, Lidman supported herself by working as a waitress, and she enrolled as a drama student at a local theater. In 1949, she completed her higher education at the University of Uppsala, having studied education, English and French. After some years of searching for a style of her own, Lidman published her first novel, Tjärdalen (The Tar Well or Tar-Boiler), in 1953. After the critical and popular success of Tjärdalen, Lidman wrote three more novels set in the isolated village world of Sweden's Norrland. These were Hjortronlandet (Cloudberry Land, 1955), Regnspiran (The Rain Bird, 1958), and Bära mistel (Carrying the Mistletoe, 1960). In these books, she went beyond entering into the collective consciousness of a rural community as had been done so successfully in Tjärdalen.
By the early 1960s, Lidman had largely completed a spiritual odyssey begun in childhood. Lidman had direct contact with gross social evils during her 1960 trip to South Africa. Her response to what she would later characterize as the "true colonial misery … the hopelessness, the despair, the disorganization" of the apartheid system in South Africa was visceral, and she was expelled from that bastion of state-sponsored racism. In response, Lidman wrote Jag och min son (I and My Son, 1961), a novel so brimming with anger that she could barely organize its message. Determined to discover more about Africa and the burdens of colonialism, Lidman lived in Kenya and Tanzania from 1962 through 1964. This experience became the basis for another novel, Med fem diamanter (With Five Diamonds, 1964). Set in Kenya during its final years as a British crown colony, Med fem diamanter relates the travails of a young Kenyan attempting to acquire the goats he is required to possess as a bride-price for the girl he loves.
Changed by her years in Africa, in the mid-1960s Lidman repudiated her early novels set in Sweden, asserting that because they had only dealt "with the minds of people" they could not possibly contain a coherent conception of society. Abandoning fiction because she saw the world in a state of crisis, Lidman became a reporter. While she could never completely neglect the need to maintain a modicum of stylistic quality in her prose, she was drawn to participate in the immense upheavals that changed the face of the world in the 1960s. During the mid-1960s, no event was more powerful than the American war in Vietnam. Completely in sympathy with the cause of North Vietnam, Lidman visited that beleaguered nation in 1966 and wrote her impressions in a series of articles for Swedish newspapers, which appeared in book form as Samtal i Hanoi (Conversations in Hanoi, 1966). In North Vietnam she observed not only destruction and suffering, but also evidence of a society united in a common cause, a situation she regarded as profoundly different from a West in which she saw private acquisitiveness and personal neurosis resulting from a lack of moral direction and social purpose.
Lidman returned from witnessing the horrors of foreign wars to the north of Sweden that was her home. In the nonfiction work Gruva (The Mine, 1968), she provided her readers with chilling details of inhuman working and living conditions among Lapland's hardrock iron miners. Although officials of the state-owned mines disagreed with her critique of the workers' situation, Lidman was vindicated two years after the publication of her book when the miners of Kiruna went out on strike for better conditions. Lidman remained angry at the indifference of Sweden - celebrated throughout the world as the model of social progress - to countless injustices. She called for a total revolution of state and society, but despaired of finding a precise blueprint or ideology that might point the way to the desired transformation.
By the end of the 1970s, Lidman had moved away from political activism and resumed writing fiction. Between 1977 and 1985, she published a five-novel suite which returned to the setting of the desolate and isolated far north of Sweden. Following this prolific period, Lidman did not publish for some years. In 1996, her novel Lifsens rot (The Root of Life) was published to critical acclaim.
In connection with her first four novels, Sara wrote extensively on political subjects, always with a strongly socialist tendency.
An author who has defined her role as one of sending uncomfortable messages to the complacent at the end of the 20th century, Lidman continued her lifelong struggle to find answers to perennial problems. It has been her hope that her labors as a writer and citizen might play a role in the emergence of a more just social order and a less destructive relationship between people and nature.
Sara was married to Hans Gösta Skarby.