August Strindberg

August Strindberg (1849-1912) was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter, known in Sweden chiefly as a novelist and playwright and abroad mostly for his plays. His novel The Red Room (1879) is often described as the first modern Swedish novel, and he is considered the father of modern Swedish literature. Among his fiction is The People of Hems, a portrait of island life in the Stockholm archipelago in the late nineteenth century.