Jan Myrdal

Jan Myrdal (born 19 July 1927 in Bromma, Stockholm) is a Swedish author, leftist-political writer and columnist. He is an honorary doctor of literature at Upsala College in New Jersey, US, and a PhD at Nankai University in Tianjin in China. He has lived at various times in the United States, Afghanistan, Iran and India. He is the son of the Social Democrats and Nobel Laureates Alva Myrdal and Gunnar Myrdal; he broke completely with both at an early age for personal reasons while keeping them in esteem for their public achievements. He was married to Gun Kessle, a photographer, graphic artist and writer, until her death in 2007. She illustrated many of his works.

In 1982 Myrdal went back to the Chinese village he reported on in 1962 and recorded his observations in Return to a Chinese Village (1984), in which he expressed his disappointment at the changes that had occurred, and his continued support of Mao's programs, including the Cultural Revolution.

Myrdal is a prolific writer, both of books and newspaper columns; he was first employed as a journalist at a local newspaper, after having dropped out of gymnasium to concentrate on his writing. He got his breakthrough in 1963 with the book Report from a Chinese Village, an anthropologic study of a Chinese village in Mao's China. Subsequently he has written many similar "reports" and travel notes from Asian countries, including India, Afghanistan and the then-Soviet Central Asian republics, in collaboration with his life partner, Gun Kessle. His 1968 book Confessions of a Disloyal European was chosen by the New York Times as one of that year's 'ten books of particular significance and excellence'. [1]

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