A new reflection on the life and work of Swedish writer Bodil Malmsten emerges ten years after her death, as a dedicated following ensures her legacy endures. Malmsten, a prolific author of poetry, autobiographies, and more, navigated a life marked by both profound hardship and artistic triumph. This piece, drawn from a personal remembrance, explores the impact of malmsten’s singular voice and unwavering commitment to earnest writing.
It was an oddly bright February day in 2016 when Bodil Malmsten passed away.
I’d met her just under a year before that.
Looking back, I think of our encounters as a series of quick courses in Malmsten’s approach to writing. Almost every conversation we had circled back to the craft.
During one of our meetings in her apartment on Söder – a space that felt like an artist’s studio, complete with a bay window and candlelight – she set down her teacup and said: “Writing doesn’t have to be serious, but it must be earnest.”
Some moments stick in your mind like a photograph, and that’s one of them. Our first meeting, however, has faded and become blurry, like a faint reflection of a dream.
I do remember it was a frigid spring day in 2015. The sky was a clear, pale blue, and the lindens around Mariatorget were glowing in the May sunshine. She took my arm, perhaps to help with her balance. She was 70 years old, and had “skin-head short” hair, as she put it, after her latest chemotherapy treatment.
We’d connected because I was hosting a podcast that paired two cultural figures. Bodil had just spent two hours talking with author Daniel Sjölin. “I have a lot of unfinished business that I’d like to complete, since my time may be limited,” she said towards the end of the recording.
Afterward, we started chatting, and she asked if I’d like to join her for a walk in the spring chill. We talked about Jämtland, where we both grew up – her in the village of Bjärme, me in Östersund – and, inevitably, about writing.
When we parted ways, we said we’d be in touch soon. And we were. During the last year of her life, a friendship formed that meant something, at least to me.
Bodil Malmsten was, among many things, a writer. In her twenties, she studied at the Idun Lovén art school and the painting program at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Later, she started a publishing house and worked as an animator, translator, cultural critic, revue writer, and playwright.
Her breakthrough came at 43, with the poetry collection “Paddan och branden” (The Toad and the Fire), which includes the poem “Döden 1986” (Death 1986). That year saw the Chernobyl disaster, which subtly permeates the text, but for the widower in the poem, the personal catastrophe was greater, as his Stella had died:
High above 81 glitters the village
Like a diamond in the sky
The streetlights along the Oviksfjällen mountains
In the dim TV evening
Shine like Fifth Avenue in Manhattan
With Tiffany’s jewelry store
THE WIDOWER cannot escape
There’s nothing magical about Bodil Malmsten’s literature. Just as there’s nothing magical about Roger Federer’s one-handed backhand, Sara-Vide Ericson’s oil paintings, or Bruce Springsteen’s harmonica on “Nebraska” – but it feels magical. Like something that, at its brightest, transcends the everyday.
Bodil seemed so fearless in her writing. Perhaps that fearlessness came from having once been at the bottom of the well and looked up.
At 17, after five years in foster care in Vällingby, where she was forced to move from Jämtland, she attempted suicide. In “Mitt första liv” (My First Life), she recounts the day she woke up at Södersjukhuset hospital under a yellow cotton blanket with a waffle pattern. Her sister Åsa stood at the foot of the bed and looked devastated.
That’s when the realization hit her, not as a gentle knock, but as a sledgehammer – the overdose and the planned death would not only have erased her own pain, but everything that exists:
“Suffer as long as you must, as long as it lasts, it will pass, I know it will pass. Do anything but that. I’ve been there and come back to tell you about it, it was nothing compared to life, it was nothing, nothing at all.”
Malmsten wrote around thirty books: poetry, autobiographies, short stories, diaries, novels, and handbooks. She depicted the little person in the big world, was furious and funny, political but never preachy.
Today, she is considered an icon – and her influence echoes in contemporary literature. I hear Bodil when I read Lina Wolff and Lyra Ekström Lindbäck. I especially hear Bodil when I read Isabella Nilsson, who shares Malmsten’s ability to combine pain points with self-awareness and humor.
In our email correspondence, which I revisit now, ten years later, we write about Proust, Pleijel, and Pamuk. We discuss apartment prices, chemo brain, wood anemone patches, scrapped writing projects, and bland comic strips. And then we write about Jämtland. One afternoon, she emails from Bjärme, where she’s visiting: “Forgotten how beautiful it is here, the view of the Oviksfjällen mountains, the long evenings, when it has rained and the mists dance over the forests – ugh, how poetic.”
Her texts had, like her books, a sometimes sharp edge.
At one point, she texted me asking what I was reading, and I mentioned a celebrated Swedish author: “WHY THEN!?”, she replied with emphatic capitalization. Me: “You don’t like [the author]?” Bodil: “Shit!”. Me: “I got curious after [the author] won the August Prize.” Bodil: “The August Prize!? When we meet next time, I’ll tell you what that says about literary quality.”
Ten years after her death, Bodil is very much alive.
A dedicated group in Jämtland wants to save her old schoolhouse, where Malmsten learned to write. In a long article in Aftonbladet a couple of years ago, a reporter retraced Malmsten’s Rover route to Finistère. In 2022, her life was portrayed in a lavish SVT documentary. She is quoted in the soccer magazine Offside and interpreted by artists. A biography is rumored to be in the works. This renewed attention speaks to her enduring legacy.
And on the memorial commemorating the Drottninggatan terrorist attack, unveiled last year, some of Bodil’s lines are immortalized, alongside authors like Rainer Maria Rilke and Tomas Tranströmer.
When our paths crossed, she was promoting her poetry collection ”Det här är hjärtat” (This is the Heart). Bodil was surprised by its success. “It’s number 2 on the bestseller lists everywhere. Completely fucking unbelievable that a poetry collection is right up there with the trash,” she messaged one morning. In the sorrowful but unsentimental book, which became her last, she writes: “People who say/Go away/when they mean die/I hate them/They will die/Everyone will die.”
Bodil Malmsten didn’t pass away on an oddly bright February day ten years ago.
She died.
I’m still trying to write earnestly.
Read more:
How Bodil Malmsten Became One of Sweden’s Most Beloved Poets
