Horace Oscar Axel Engdahl is a Swedish literary historian and critic, and has been a member of the Swedish Academy since 1997. He was the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, i.e. its spokesman, from 1999 to June 2009, when he was succeeded by Swedish author and historian Peter Englund.
Engdahl was born in Karlskrona, Blekinge, Sweden. He earned his B.A. in 1970 at Stockholm University he earned his doctoral degree in 1987, with a study on Swedish romanticism, but had meanwhile been active as a literary critic, translator and journal editor, and was one of the introducers of the continental tradition of literary scholarship in Sweden. He is adjunct professor of Scandinavian literature at the University of Aarhus in Denmark. He speaks Swedish, English, German, French and Russian fluently.
Source: Wikipedia