Barabbas, written by Pär Lagerkvist, was published in 1950 and turns around the man who was released from execution in the place of Jesus and spends his time trying to comprehend the stranger's life and beliefs. Seeking but without finding his true beliefs, in lack of the capability to love and left to loneliness and anguish, Barabbas is the portait of the modern man.
During his career Pär Lagerkvist kept asking the big philosophical questions ("Why do we live?", "How should the world be understood?") over and over, but somehow without repeating himself. In 1951 he was rewarded with the Nobel Prize in Literature "for the artistic vigour and true independence of mind with which he endeavours in his poetry to find answers to the eternal questions confronting mankind".
