Selma Lagerlöf

Lagerlöf was lame for several years in childhood after an illness, spending long stretches confined and listening to her grandmother's Värmland folktales, material she would spend a lifetime transmuting into fiction. She trained and worked as a schoolteacher while writing her debut, Gösta Berling's Saga, submitted to a magazine competition and rejected once before winning over its judges in revision.

The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (1906-07), a geography textbook reimagined as a boy's flight across Sweden on a goose's back, made her a household name at home and abroad. In 1909 she became the first woman awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and in 1914 the first woman elected to the Swedish Academy. In her final years, already frail, she used her position and royalties to help German-Jewish writers, including Nelly Sachs, escape the Nazis.