To win the Nobel Prize is to see all things of one’s life celebrated. Even an insect collection from childhood. Thus the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm created an exhibit of Tranströmer’s boyhood insect collection. An accompanying guide book was also published in a limited edition by Fredrik Sjöberg, an entomologist, who describes in six beautiful essays the young Tranströmer’s forays over Runmarö island in the Stockholm archipelago, in search of all things insect, small and rare.
The essays are preceded by a citation by Charles Darwin: “It seems therefore that a taste for collecting beetles is some indication for future success in life.”