The internationally renowned Strindberg and Bergman scholar Egil Törnqvist, professor emeritus at the University of Amsterdam, passed away on March 9, 2015 after a short illness.

Törnqvist was born on December 19, 1932 in Uppsala, where he also began his academic studies. After completing his B.A. and M.A. degrees he became a lecturer in Swedish at Harvard University (1957-1958). Returning to Uppsala he continued his graduate work and completed an advanced degree (fil.lic.) in 1962. During the next several years (1963-1969) he served as research assistant in Drama Studies and defended his doctoral thesis on Eugene O’Neill in 1968, which led to an assistant professorship in Literature/ Drama Studies at his alma mater. In the following year (1969) he began a long academic career as Professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He remained in Amsterdam until his death and considered the city and its academic environment his real domicile.

Egil Törnqvist focussed much of his research on August Strindberg as a dramatist and on the film and theatre productions of Ingmar Bergman. He established a broad international network in these academic fields. He was the main organizer of the eight Strindberg Conference in Amsterdam in 1986 and became an esteemed contributor to such scholarly journals as Strindbergiana, Scandinavica, Scandinavian Studies, Theatre Studies and Modern Drama. Fluent in Swedish, English and Dutch, Törnqvist lectured frequently at international conferences and at a number of European and American universities. Many of his articles were translated into Italian, Polish, Russian and Czech. Among his very large production of book-length works, many of them published by Amsterdam University Press, are the following: Strindberg's Miss Julie: A Play and its Transpositions (with Barry Jacobs), 1988; Between Stage and Screen: Ingmar Bergman Directs, 1995; Strindberg's The Ghost Sonata: From Text to Performance, 2000; Strindberg on Drama and Theatre (with Birgitta Steene), 2007. Shortly before his death, Törnqvist completed the current AUP volume on Ingmar Bergman's stage productions.

For his extensive research, Egil Törnqvist was awarded the Swedish Strindberg Prize in 2004. The award committee's motivation was that in using the world as his arena “Egil Törnqvist made clear the uniqueness of Strindberg's dramas and their impact on playwrights and filmmakers in our time.”