Goran Tunstrom; Swedish Novelist, Poet

Goran Tunstrom, 62, eclectic Swedish writer who earned awards for poetry, novels, dramas and travel stories. The thoughts of death, lost childhood, father-and-son relationships and the search for identity were recurring themes in his works, triggered by his father’s death when the future writer was 12. Because his father died at age 54, Tunstrom also was convinced that he would not live past his 54th birthday. “There is no writing without pain,” Tunstrom once said, and in recent years he had been plagued by a heart attack, stroke, lung cancer and three car accidents. He wrote his first effort, a 35-page thriller, the year of his father’s death, and at 21, in 1958, Tunstrom published his first poetry collection. But he did not gain wide public acclaim until 1983 with his epic novel “Christmas Oratorio,” which was made into a Swedish film. The story spans three generations, starting in the 1930s in Sweden and ending in New Zealand. Tunstrom spent summers in Sweden but lived in New York in the winter for many years. On Feb. 5 in Stockholm of heart failure.