New Swedish Books, spring 2017 1
New Swedish Books 30 By Martina Lowden Celebratin
g Books Swedish literary prizes and prize-winners ‘Authors shouldn’t be rewarded. They should scar their readers.’ These words are from the third volume of Lars Norén’s mammoth work En dramatikers dagbok (A Dramatist’s Diary, 2016). But the land of the Nobel Prize is a country enamoured with medals, diplomas and prize cheques. Both the quality and the tabloid press award their own literary prizes. So do many magazines, publishers and literary societies, as well as cities, regions and municipalities. It’s probably just a matter of time before some illustrious institution sets up a prize for literary prizes. And in spite of his criticism of prizes, the third volume of Lars Norén’s diary was nominated for – the August Prize. Strong Novels Augustpriset (The August Prize) is the publishing industry’s own literary prize, established by the Swedish Publishers’ Association in 1989. Perhaps it could more appropriately be called the August Prizes, since three are awarded every autumn: one to Best Swedish Fiction Book of the Year, one to the Best Swedish NonFiction Book of the Year, and one to the Best Swedish Children’s or Young Adult Book of the Year. The process of crowning a winner is the same for each of the three prizes. A jury nominates six titles, which are then read by 21 judges (seven librarians, seven booksellers and seven critics). They vote for that year’s winning title. Even though both poetry and formally challenging prose works are often nominated for the fiction prize, the winner tends to be a novel that marries innovative aspects with classic storytelling. That was the case in 2015, with Allt jag inte minns (Everything I Don’t Remember), the novelist and playwright Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s first full-length novel since the groundbreaking Montecore (Montecore, 2005). In it, many different voices form a contradictory portrait of a dead man. Central to the novel are class and money, but also the hard-to-define boundary between friendship and love. The previous year’s winner, Kristina Sandberg’s Liv till varje pris (Life at Any Cost), is the last part in an ambitious trilogy that follows the housewife Maj and her family from the 30s to the 50s. Sandberg’s prose masterfully captures Maj’s shifting moods and recreates the atmospheres, tastes and scents of a past world. Compared with these two authors, the latest winner of the August Prize, Lina Wolff, is a newer voice in Swedish literature. Inspired by Spanish and Latin American writing traditions, she writes tenderly hardboiled stories about human desire. The characters are