Carl-Göran Ekerwald was awarded Jan Myrdal’s big prize – the Lenin Award for 2022 with the following justification:
“Like a completely original, atypical left-wing intellectual and modern-day Diderot or Gramsci, with his life at stake and with hatred for the indifferent, this forest ranger’s boy and one-man encyclopaedia from Jämtland has, for nearly 100 years, shaped and conveyed an ever-expanding educational journey through history, art, literature and music. In a rare mixture of erudition and desire to discover, he has with the curiosity of a child in a strangely wide-ranging and passionate contribution to popular education in around 60 works of all genres, helped us all to see, listen and understand in our own endeavour to try to grasp the world’s different cultures and our own existence. With a distinctive union of thought and feeling in a kind of timeless existentialism and through a headstrong polemic against official history writing, he has given new views of our greatest artists and through an intuitive impressionistic writing style created an essay art of his own kind where he with audacity, humour and courage has dissected everything from the Bible and the Koran over the Sufi mystical Persian poetry to the psychology of the French Revolution. No other leftist in the Swedish public has with such cosmically directed persistence in the present and history searched for the revolting popular democratic and shown that another world is and must be possible!”
