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The Rök Runestone from circa 800 AD has passages from sagas and legends. By 1200, Christianity was firmly established and a Medieval European culture appeared in Sweden. Swedish Reformation literature between 1526 and 1658 consisted of only the Bible and a few other religious works. The Renaissance era, between 1630 and 1718 is regarded as the beginning of the Swedish literary tradition. In 1658 Georg Stiernhielm published his Herculus poem. The 18th century has been described as the Swedish Golden Age in literature, which led to the breakthrough of secular literature. Swedish literature consolidated around 1750, with the leading writers being Olov von Dalin (1708–1763), Carolus Linnaeus (1707–1778) and the poets Johan Henrik Kellgren (1751–1795) and Carl Michael Bellman (1740–1795).
The period circa 1805–1840 is known as Romanticism. There were so many great Swedish poets that the era is referred to as the Golden Age of Swedish poetry. [Carl Jonas Love Almqvist]] (1793–1866) was a leading writer in 19th century Sweden.
In Sweden, the period starting in 1880 is known as realism because the writing had a strong focus on social realism. In the late 19th and early 20th century, Scandinavian literature made its first and so far only impression on world literature with August Strindberg, Ola Hansson, Selma Lagerlöf and Victoria Benedictsson. In the 1890s, the first key literary figures to emerge were Verner von Heidenstam (1859–1940) and Selma Lagerlöf (1858–1940), who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1909. In the 1900s, one of the earliest novelists was Hjalmar Söderberg (1869–1941). A well-known proletarian writer who gained fame after World War II was Vilhelm Moberg (1898–1973). In the 1930s a new awareness of children's needs emerged. This manifested itself shortly after World War II, when Astrid Lindgren published Pippi Longstocking in 1945. In the 1960s, Maj Sjöwall (1935–) and Per Wahlöö (1926–1975) collaborated to produce a series of internationally acclaimed detective novels. The most successful writer of detective novels is Henning Mankell (1948–), which has been translated into 37 languages. In the spy fiction genre, the most successful writer is Jan Guillou (1944–).