John Ågren

(March 12, 1950 --)

John Ågren entered Swedish fandom in 1968; a friend of Ulf Westblom and Per Insulander, he initially belonged to the SSFS club founded by Westblom, but soon joined also the main Stockholm club SFSF. He contributed to Westblom's first fanzine, Mentat, then with Westblom and Insulander published one of Sweden's earliest and best fannish fanzines, DNQ, which had a total of 6 issues 1969--1981, was a board member of SFSF for several years and co-owner with Per Insulander and John-Henri Holmberg of LFP, a book producing and publishing company which during its ten years of operation published or produced for other publishers around 75 sf books as well as the first incarnation of the prozine Nova Science Fiction. With Ulf Westblom he also wrote a wild west novel under the pen name "John West" (Du ska dö, "You Will Die", 1974, heavily tuckerized), a science fiction novel (Porten mot evigheten, "Gate to Eternity", 1976), and numerous short stories; he was on the committees of several Stockholm conventions during the 1970s.

His fan activities declined drastically after his 1981 dissertation at the Stockholm Royal Institute of Technology, where he later became tenured as a full professor of metallurgy and as head of the department. In 2006 he was inducted as a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences and in 2018 elected to the US National Academy of Engineering; he is the recipient of the 2011 Hume-Rothery Award and of the 2021 J. Willard Gibbs Phase Equilibria Award.