Lars Ahlin belongs to the generation of great writers that blossomed in the 1940s and 1950s. He is among the first to indicate a change in artistic consciousness among Swedish writers by his rejection of the mechanisms of illusions of the traditional novel. The inspiration for his theories that the reader should be emotionally detached from characters and plot came from the French and German novels of the 1920s, though also the novels of Eyvind Johnson may have served as a model. He belongs to a school of writers that may be labeled "Christian realists," evoking a concept developed by Erich Auerbach in Mimesis (1946). Its foremost representative is Fyodor Dostoevsky. Ahlin sees the writer as a "förbedjare" (intercessor) or "identificator" (identifier) speaking on behalf of the poor, the miserable, and those without a voice of their own.

Lars Gustav Ahlin was born 4 April 1915 in Sundsvall in...