For several years he was active as a local politician for the Swedish Social Democratic Party.

Lindgren began as a poet in 1965 but had to wait until 1982 for his breakthrough, with the novel The Way of a Serpent (Swedish: Ormens väg på hälleberget).

Lindgren's work was translated into more than thirty languages and was one of Sweden's most internationally successful contemporary writers.

[2] The Way of a Serpent tells the story of a farmer family in a poverty-stricken region in the northern parts of Sweden in the nineteenth century.

The family formerly owned its land but had to sell it cheap during a succession of years of famine.