Gunnel Vallquist (19 June 1918 â 11 January 2016) was a Swedish writer and translator. She was elected a member of the Swedish Academy. Vallquist wrote several essays on Catholic religion in contemporary times, and translated the seven-part novel In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust into Swedish.
Born in Stockholm in 1918, Vallquist's father was Lieutenant Colonel Gunnar Vallquist and her mother was translator Lily Vallquist. She was educated at an all-girlsâ school in Skövde Gunnel, but finished school and graduated in Stockholm. The family had moved after Gunnar Vallquist's death. Vallquist was married for a short time to an officer. After her marriage, in 1939, she converted to Catholicism, at the Sankta Ingridshem chapel of the French Dominican sisters. She worked as a secretary in the Swedish army, before moving to Uppsala in 1941 to study Nordic and Romance languages. She earned a master's degree in 1946 at Uppsala University.
After the Second World War, Vallquist lived in Paris, where she wrote magazine reviews, and translated literature from French to Swedish. Her translations include works by Bernanos, Balzac, Claudel, Descartes, and Weil. In 1950 she began to translate the seven-piece novel In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust into Swedish, which took her thirty years to complete. She lived in Rome from 1955 to 1958. Vallquist wrote several essays on Catholic religion in contemporary times, among them reports from the Second Vatican Council. In the 1970s, Vallquist was part of a bible commission charged with making a new translation of the New Testament, but she resigned in protest against the way the translation was being carried out.
Vallquist was elected a member of the Swedish Academy in 1982. She died in Bromma in 2016.