August Strindberg

August Strindberg was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter who wrote more than sixty plays and more than thirty other works over a career spanning four decades. A bold experimenter who often drew directly on his own life, he moved across dramatic forms from naturalistic tragedy to historical drama, and his later plays, including A Dream Play and The Ghost Sonata, anticipated the expressionist and surrealist theatre of the following century. Regarded as the father of modern Swedish literature, he is known internationally chiefly as a playwright, though in Sweden he is remembered equally as a novelist, essayist and painter.