Hedvig Amalia af Petersens was the daughter of a colonel from Gothenburg; she became a journalist for the newspaper Aftonbladet in the early 1900s, but soon transferred to the paper Stockholms Dagblad, where she worked from 1905 to 1911 together with colleagues such as the critic Klara Johanson and the poet Birger Sjöberg, about whom she wrote a memoir book in 1956.
When her father was widowed, she gave up her work to care for him. After he died, she settled in Lund, where she devoted herself to independent academic study, studying, for example, Carlyle and Tegnér. In addition to her two autobiographical books Ett barns litterära memoarer, 1917, and Oscariskt sommarhem, 1963, she wrote several travel accounts following extensive travels in Australia and New Zealand.
