His origins were humble; a working-class boy from a small military town in  northern Sweden, not far from the Arctic Circle. Today, he is one of the most  influential figures in the world of literature, because Peter Englund is  Permanent Secretary to the Swedish Academy, the body that awards the Nobel Prize  in Literature.
For someone who has within his power the making or breaking of  international writing careers, Peter, as you'll hear, is remarkably unassuming.  Perhaps one reason for this is that he's still a writer himself; he understands  the writing process profoundly, and his own books have been both bestsellers and  widely acclaimed. His most recent, just launched in London, is a stunning new  approach to the history of the First World War. Subtitled "an intimate history",  The  Beauty and the Sorrow explores the personal aspects of war: not the grand  strategies concocted in the cabinets of Europe, but the experiences of  "ordinary" people from around the world, all now unknown - were it not for  Peter's deeply moving book.