Per Wästberg was born in 1933 in Stockholm. He published his first prose work, Pojke med såpbubblor (Boy with soap bubbles), as a fifteen-year-old in 1949, received his bachelor of arts degree from Harvard in 1955, and earned his Ph.D. from Uppsala in 1962 with a thesis on the African novel. His breakthrough novel, Halva kungariket (Half of the kingdom), appeared in 1955. In the ensuing years, he has published many novels, books of poetry, essays, and travel writings, with a special interest in African culture and literatures and the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa. From 1976 to 1982 he was the chief editor of Dagens Nyheter, arguably Scandinavia’s leading newspaper. President of the Swedish Pen Club from 1967 to 1978, he was elected to the Swedish Academy in 1997 and since 1998 has been on the Nobel Committee for Literature. While Wästberg is perhaps best known as a novelist and essayist, particularly with regard to Africa, the excerpts that follow are taken from works describing his family’s place in Stockholm life in the course of almost two centuries.