Paul Britten Austin

Paul Britten Austin
Paul Britten Austin
Born	(1922-04-05)5 April 1922 Dawlish, Devon, England
Died	25 July 2005(2005-07-25) (aged 83)
Occupation	Translator, broadcaster, administrator, scholar of Swedish literature
Spouse(s)	Margareta Bergman
Awards	North Star, Swedish Academy's Special Prize & Interpretation Prize

Paul Britten Austin (5 April 1922 – 25 July 2005) was an English author, translator, broadcaster, administrator, and scholar of Swedish literature.

He is known in particular for his translations of and books on the Swedish musician, singer and poet Carl Michael Bellman, including his prizewinning book The Life and Songs of Carl Michael Bellman. He also translated books by many other Swedish authors.

Alongside his work on Swedish literature, Britten Austin spent 25 years assembling a trilogy of history books, 1812: Napoleon's Invasion of Russia, telling the story of Napoleon Bonaparte's failed campaign entirely through eyewitness accounts.

Britten Austin was born in Dawlish, South Devon, England. His parents were the writers Frederick B.A. Britten Austin and Mildred King. He was educated at Winchester College. In 1947 he married Eileen Patricia Roberts, and had one son, Derek Austin, but the marriage was short lived. In 1951, he married the novelist Margareta Bergman, sister of film director Ingmar Bergman. They lived in Stockholm, where he was head of Sveriges Radio's English-language broadcasting from 1948 to 1957. He directed the Swedish Tourist Office in London between 1957 and 1968, at the same time working on his book on Carl Michael Bellman.

Britten Austin is best known for his work The Life and Songs of Carl Michael Bellman. It describes the life and times of Sweden's bard, the eighteenth century singer and poet Carl Michael Bellman. It was the first full biography of Bellman in any language. The Swedish Academy awarded Britten Austin their special prize for the book, and its interpretation prize in 1979. One reason for this was that it was the first substantial work on Bellman in English (if not in any language); another is the quality of Britten Austin's writing. For example:

In 1768, the year before Oxenstierna had first heard him at Lissander's, or perhaps even a year before that, Bellman had begun to compose an entirely new sort of song. A genre which "had no model and can have no successors" (Kellgren), these songs were to grow swiftly in number until they made up the great work on which Bellman's reputation as a poet chiefly rests.
He called them Fredman's Epistles.
To understand the title it is necessary to go back twenty years. In the seventeen forties, when Carl Michael was growing up in the Lilla Daurerska Huset, the man who had been responsible for seeing to it that the finest clocks of court and city kept time was Jean Fredman—he with the penchant for wigs, lavender water and other Frenchified refinements...