The most famous people from Sweden include Alfred Nobel, the chemist who invented dynamite and left his fortune to fund the Nobel Prizes, and the list continues with the botanist Carl Linnaeus, who created the system of scientific names for living things; the children's author Astrid Lindgren, creator of Pippi Longstocking; the pop group ABBA, who won Eurovision with "Waterloo" in 1974; the actress Ingrid Bergman, winner of three Academy Awards; the tennis player Björn Borg, five times Wimbledon champion in a row; and Dag Hammarskjöld, the United Nations Secretary-General who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize after his death in 1961. Sweden's contribution is spread unusually evenly across fields, so this guide takes them one at a time, from the laboratory to the ski slope.
Linnaeus, Celsius and Arrhenius: the Uppsala scientists
Much of Swedish science grew out of Uppsala University, north of Stockholm. Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) was a curate's son from Råshult in rural Småland who began lecturing in botany at Uppsala in 1730. While studying in the Dutch Republic he published the first edition of Systema Naturae in 1735, and over the following decades he formalised binomial nomenclature, the two-part Latin names such as Homo sapiens that biologists still use for every species. He was ennobled in 1761 as Carl von Linné.
Anders Celsius (1701–1744) was professor of astronomy at Uppsala from 1730, founded the Uppsala Astronomical Observatory in 1741 and in 1742 proposed the centigrade temperature scale. His original version ran the other way round, with 0 for boiling water and 100 for freezing; it was later inverted and renamed after him. Svante Arrhenius (1859–1927), born at Vik near Uppsala, became one of the founders of physical chemistry and in 1903 the first Swede to win a Nobel Prize, in chemistry. He was also the first to use physical chemistry to estimate how much rising carbon dioxide would warm the Earth.
Alfred Nobel: dynamite, 355 patents and a will signed in Paris
Alfred Nobel (1833–1896) was born in Stockholm into a family of engineers, spoke six languages and filed his first patent at 24. He held 355 patents in all, but the one that made his fortune was dynamite, patented in 1867, a way of stabilising the dangerous liquid explosive nitroglycerin so it could be handled safely in mines and construction.
On 27 November 1895, at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris, Nobel signed a will that surprised his family: after taxes and personal bequests, 94 per cent of his assets, 31,225,000 Swedish kronor, went to establish five prizes for physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace, to be awarded without regard to nationality. The prizes other than peace are presented in Stockholm each 10 December, the anniversary of his death, and they are the reason his name is known around the world.
Selma Lagerlöf, August Strindberg, Astrid Lindgren and Tomas Tranströmer: the writers
Selma Lagerlöf (1858–1940) was born at Mårbacka, a manor in Värmland, and published her first novel, Gösta Berling's Saga, at 33. In 1906 and 1907 she published The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, the story of a boy who flies across Sweden on the back of a goose, commissioned by the National Teachers Association as a geography reader for Swedish schools. In 1909 she became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and in 1914 the first woman admitted to the Swedish Academy.
August Strindberg (1849–1912) wrote more than 60 plays and over 30 works of fiction, history and autobiography. His naturalistic dramas The Father (1887) and Miss Julie (1888) are staged worldwide, and his later plays anticipated expressionism. Astrid Lindgren (1907–2002) grew up at Näs near Vimmerby in Småland and worked on the local newspaper before moving to Stockholm. Pippi Longstocking, rejected by the publisher Bonniers, won first prize in a competition in 1945; Emil of Lönneberga, Karlsson-on-the-Roof and Ronia the Robber's Daughter followed, and in 2017 she was calculated to be the world's 18th most translated author. The poet Tomas Tranströmer (1931–2015), born in Stockholm and a psychologist by profession, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011.
Jenny Lind, ABBA, Max Martin and Avicii: the musicians
Sweden's first international music star was Jenny Lind (1820–1887), a soprano born in the Klara district of central Stockholm. Her 1838 performance as Agathe in Der Freischütz at the Royal Swedish Opera made her name, and from 1850 she toured the United States under the promoter P. T. Barnum as the "Swedish Nightingale".
ABBA formed in Stockholm in 1972, taking their name from the initials of Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad. They won the Eurovision Song Contest for Sweden in 1974 with "Waterloo", later voted the best song in the contest's history at its 50th anniversary in 2005. After a four-decade break they released the album Voyage on 5 November 2021, and the ABBA Voyage show, with the band performing as digital avatars, opened in London in May 2022.
Behind the scenes, Max Martin (born 1971), from Stenhamra outside Stockholm, has written or co-written 30 Billboard Hot 100 number-one singles, starting with Britney Spears's "...Baby One More Time" in 1998; he has produced or co-produced 28 of them, a chart record. Tim Bergling (1989–2018), known as Avicii, took dance music into the mainstream: "Levels" (2011) was his first Hot 100 entry, and "Wake Me Up" (2013) was Spotify's most-streamed song by February 2014.
Greta Garbo, Ingrid Bergman and Ingmar Bergman: the film-makers
Greta Garbo (1905–1990) was born Greta Gustafsson in Södermalm, Stockholm, and had her breakthrough in a supporting role in the Swedish film The Saga of Gösta Berling (1924), based on Lagerlöf's novel. In Hollywood, MGM advertised her first sound film, Anna Christie (1930), with the line "Garbo talks!"; she was nominated for Best Actress several times and received an honorary Academy Award in 1954 "for her luminous and unforgettable screen performances". Ingrid Bergman (1915–1982), also born in Stockholm, won three Academy Awards, for Gaslight (1944), Anastasia (1956) and Murder on the Orient Express (1974), making her one of only four actresses with at least three acting Oscars.
Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007), no relation, was born in Uppsala, the son of a Lutheran minister who later became chaplain to the King. The Seventh Seal (1957), with its knight playing chess against Death, Wild Strawberries (1957), Persona (1966) and Fanny and Alexander (1982) were all included in the 2012 edition of Sight & Sound's critics' poll of the best films ever made. From 1961 he shot many of his films on the Baltic island of Fårö, where he spent much of his later life.
Björn Borg, Ingemar Stenmark, Annika Sörenstam, Zlatan Ibrahimović and Armand Duplantis: the athletes
Björn Borg (born 1956) won eleven major singles titles: six French Opens and five consecutive Wimbledons from 1976 to 1980. He was year-end world number one in 1979 and 1980 and announced his retirement in January 1983, at 26. Ingemar Stenmark (born 1956), from Joesjö in Lapland and raised in Tärnaby near the Norwegian border, won 86 World Cup alpine races, a record that no man has broken and that stood overall until Mikaela Shiffrin passed it in 2023. Annika Sörenstam (born 1970) won 72 official LPGA tournaments, including ten majors, completed the career grand slam in 2003 and is the only woman to shoot a 59 in competition.
Zlatan Ibrahimović (born 1981) was born in Malmö and began at Malmö FF in 1999 before playing for Ajax, Juventus, Inter, Barcelona, Milan, Paris Saint-Germain and Manchester United. His 62 goals make him Sweden's all-time leading scorer. Armand Duplantis (born 1999) was born and raised in Lafayette, Louisiana, to an American father and a Swedish mother, and competes for Sweden. He is the Olympic pole-vault champion of 2020 and 2024 and holds the world record of 6.31 metres.
Dag Hammarskjöld, Raoul Wallenberg and Olof Palme: the statesmen and diplomats
Dag Hammarskjöld (1905–1961), son of a Swedish prime minister, became the second Secretary-General of the United Nations in April 1953 at 47, still the youngest holder of the post. He died on 18 September 1961 when his DC-6 airliner crashed near Ndola in Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia. He had created the first UN peacekeeping forces, in Egypt and the Congo, and that year's Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to him posthumously, the only time that has happened.
Raoul Wallenberg (1912–disappeared 1945) served as Sweden's special envoy in Budapest from July to December 1944, issuing protective passports to Hungarian Jews and sheltering them in buildings he declared Swedish territory; Yad Vashem estimates that about 4,500 people received his protective papers. Soviet agents detained him on 17 January 1945 and he was never seen free again. In 2016 the Swedish Tax Agency declared him dead, with a formal date of 31 July 1952. Olof Palme (1927–1986) led the Social Democrats from 1969 and was prime minister from 1969 to 1976 and from 1982 until 28 February 1986, when he was shot on Sveavägen in central Stockholm while walking home from a cinema with his wife.
Ingvar Kamprad, Daniel Ek and Greta Thunberg: the founders and campaigners
Modern Sweden's best-known exports include two companies built by individuals. Ingvar Kamprad (1926–2018), from Pjätteryd in the Älmhult area of Småland, founded IKEA in 1943 at the age of 17, and by 2008 it was the world's largest furniture retailer. Daniel Ek (born 1983), who grew up in the Rågsved district of Stockholm, co-founded Spotify with Martin Lorentzon in 2006 and turned it into a global music-streaming service.
Greta Thunberg (born 2003) began a solo school strike outside the Riksdag, Sweden's parliament, on 20 August 2018, at the age of 15, after the country's hottest summer in at least 262 years. Her protest grew into the international Fridays for Future movement of school climate strikes.
Many of these lives are rooted in a handful of places: Uppsala for Linnaeus, Celsius and Ingmar Bergman; Småland for Linnaeus, Lindgren and Kamprad; and Stockholm, Sweden's capital, where Nobel, Garbo, Lind and Tranströmer were born and where the Nobel Prizes are still presented. To read Lagerlöf or Lindgren in the original you would need the Swedish language, and for the two team games Swedes follow most, football and ice hockey, see the national sport of Sweden.