Sweden

EVERY YEAR, LITRO PUBLISHES INTERNATIONAL EDITIONS FOCUSING ON DIFFERENT PARTS OF THE GLOBE.

For this World Series edition, we turn our pages to Sweden. Even those of you who’ve never been to Sweden will have ideas about what it’s like, and what kind of literature comes out of it (moody detectives, anyone?), but in putting together this issue we wanted to present a different view of our northern neighbours, one that encompasses the rural life of the arctic circle and challenges norms and expectations about what can be said and how.

  • Lina Wolff

    Lina Wolff

    Lina Wolff has lived and worked in Italy and Spain. During her years in Valencia and Madrid, she began to write her short story collection Många människor dör som du(‘Many People Die Like You’; Albert Bonniers Förlag, 2009). Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs, her first novel, was awarded the prestigious Vi Magazine Literature Prize and shortlisted for the 2013 Swedish Radio Award for Best Novel of the Year. She now lives in southern Sweden. Her second novel, De polyglotta älskarna (‘The Polyglot Lovers’), is forthcoming from Albert Bonniers Förlag in 2016.

  • Cilla Naumann

    Cilla Naumann

    Cilla lives in Stockholm and has been working as a journalist since the mid-1980s, when she led coverage of the Olof Palme assassination for Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s largest morning newspaper. She made her literary debut in 1995 with the novel Vattenhjärta (Water Heart), receiving that year’s major Swedish debut novel award. Since then, she has written more than ten novels for adults and young adults and received many awards and award nominations. Several of her books have been translated into other languages, including German, Dutch and Danish, and two of her short stories have been adapted for the screen.

  • Jonas Hassen Khemiri

    Jonas Hassen Khemiri

    Jonas Hassen Khemiri is one of the most important writers of his generation in Sweden. When his debut novel, One Eye Red (Ett öga rött) was published in 2003, Khemiri’s eccentric and imaginative prose made a huge splash and reached an audience far beyond traditional literary circles. The book-turned-phenomenon was awarded the Borås Tidning Award for Best Literary Debut Novel and also became an enormous bestseller, selling over 200,000 copies in paperback – the most of any book, all categories, in Sweden in 2004.

  • Agri Ismail

    Agri Ismail

    Agri Ismaïl is an Iraq and Swedish-based writer of fiction, legalese and criticism. Co-founder of Ludwig Salon in Dubai, former columnist for Soma Magazine in Iraqi Kurdistan, co-editor of Abstract Modem.

  • Malte Persson

    Malte Persson

    Malte Persson is a Swedish author. His first book Livet på den här planeten "Life on this planet", a novel, was published in 2002. His subsequent two books are collections of poetry, Apolloprojektet "The Apollo Project" (2004) and Dikter "Poems" (2007). Persson has been said to belong to modernist group of LANGUAGE-poetry forming around the Swedish literary magazine OEI.

  • Maria Friberg

    Maria Friberg

    Maria Friberg is a Swedish artist known for her works revolving around themes of power, masculinity and man's relationship to nature. Her images depict ambiguous tableaus with isolated figures in provocative situations.