Karin Boye's best-known work is Kallocain: Roman från 2000-talet (Kallocain: A Novel from the 2000s), a dystopian futuristic novel she published in 1940, the year before her death. Portraying life in a state that controls almost every aspect of its citizens' lives, the work presents obvious parallels to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). It also represents one of Boye's many attempts to come to grips with the origins, nature, and dangers of totalitarianism, as well as the possible roles of literature and language in overcoming it. While it is possible to see Kallocain as the culmination of nearly two decades of literary production, Boye also published a variety of noteworthy works in other genres, including several volumes of poetry, two collections of short stories, four additional novels, essays, reviews, and literary translations.

Her work also speaks to different audiences. To a non-Swedish...