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

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.