Horace Oscar Axel Engdahl (born December 30, 1948) is a Swedish literary historian and critic. He has been the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy since 1999.

Engdahl was born in Karlskrona, Blekinge. He earned his B.A. in 1970 at Stockholm University, and began his doctoral studies there; he completed his Ph.D. only in 1987, with a study on Swedish romanticism, but had meanwhile been active as a literary critic, translator and journal editor, and was one of the introducers of the continental tradition of literary scholarship in Sweden.