with the WikiLeaks portal, which he accused of delivering death lists for the Taliban. Writing Gustafsson published poetry, novels, short stories, critical essays, and editorials. He gained international recognition as a Swedish writer. By 1990, he had already received a dozen major literary awards including the in 1983, Una Vita per la Letteratura in 1989, as well as the Swedish Bellman Prize in 1990. He won a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for poetry in 1994. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature (the year is unknown as the Nobel Committee keeps nominations secret for 50 years). Among later awards were the in 2006, the Goethe Medal in 2009, and the Thomas Mann Prize in 2015. He won the 2016 International Nonino Prize in Italy. Gustafsson's novels and poetry have been translated into fifteen languages, the most often translated being the novels The Death of a Beekeeper (En biodlares död), Bernard Foy's Third Castling (Bernard Foys tredje rockad), and Afternoon of a Tiler (En kakelsättares eftermiddag). Harold Bloom includes Gustafsson in The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994, p. 557). The Death of a Beekeeper, published in 1978, is Gustafsson's best-known novel. John Updike praised it as "a beautiful work, lyrical and bleak, resonant and terse." Ia Dübois has called it "one of his greatest works." Eva Stenskar has written that it "seems so effortless yet lyrical that only an artist at the height of his powers could've produced it." Its main theme is the agony of disease, as it follows Vesslan—a beekeeper who is dying of cancer—through entries he makes on notepads. The book's innovative structure allows Gustafsson to explore identity through its expression in a variety of forms: imagination, memory and even the mundane details of life. The book's central theme is revealed by the repeated motto of the protagonist, "We never give up. We begin anew." Gustafsson himself has described it as "A book about pain. It describes a journey into the center where pain rules—and pain can tolerate no rivals." The novel was re-published in 1984 as the last in a five-novel sequence Sprickorna i muren (The Cracks in the Wall), the other volumes being Herr Gustafsson själv, Yllet, Familjefesten, and Sigismund. Bernard Foy's Third Castling (1986) is nearly as well known as The Death of a Beekeeper. Its settings are Sweden, Paris, Worpsewede, Germany, and Texas. The overt