Meet
Brutus Östling

Brutus Östling was born in 1958 in Stockholm and grew up in Skälby, Järfälla.

In 1982, he founded the publishing house Symposion and spent 25 years working full-time as a publisher of both fiction and non-fiction. Today, the publishing house operates as a passion project alongside his photography and writing.

Brutus dreamed of becoming a photographer as a teenager, but didn’t pick up a camera for over two decades. In 1996 he began scuba diving, a generous award from the Swedish Academy for his contributions to public education led him to invest in professional underwater photography equipment. Until the fall of 1999, his work focused exclusively on underwater photography. His photo essays were published in diving magazines like UVM, Dyk, and Tauchen, as well as Dagens Nyheter. For the past 25 years, however, his photography has taken place almost entirely on land.

In 2005, he transitioned into full-time photography somewhat by chance. His first two books became unexpected bestsellers and were later published in the U.S., the U.K., and several other countries. Since then, Brutus has worked full-time as a photographer and, for the past decade, also as an author — primarily focusing on wildlife and nature. Since his debut book Between the Wing Tips in 2005, he has published twelve more photo books. Critics have praised him as a master and a world-class nature photographer.

Four of Brutus’s books have been named Nature Book of the Year (Årets Pandabok) by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). In 2009, he received Sweden’s prestigious August Prize for nonfiction for Surviving the Day, co-authored with Susanne Åkesson, professor of zooecology at Lund University.

For nearly a decade, Brutus has also written the texts for his own books. In 2011, he made his literary debut with Beneath the Asphalt Lies a Beach, about Midway Atoll in the Pacific Ocean — once a U.S. naval base, now a nature reserve and home to the world’s largest albatross colony, with up to a million breeding pairs on two small islands.

His two most recent titles, Winged (2015) and Under African Skies (2018), were both named WWF’s Nature Book of the Year. In 2020, he published a large-format photography handbook: The Art of Photographing Birds and Other Wildlife. Version 2.0.

Personal website: https://www.brutusostling.se/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brutus.ostling