New Swedish Books, autumn 2019 1
New Swedish Books 42 Nobel. The Enigmatic Alfred
A Swede who lived the greater part of his life in Russia and France. A boy who spent a couple of years in poor school but grew up to become rich by harnessing the laws of physics to create explosive inventions. A romantic who furnished his house with a room for his wife and a high chair for his baby, but never married. A benefactor who financed peace movements with money he earned through the armaments industry. A man whose prestigious-sounding surname seems ideally suited for the awards distributed every year to those who have “conferred the greatest benefit on mankind”, despite actually being derived from the Scanian place name Nöbbelöv, related to an old word for ‘hovel’ or ‘shack’. Ingrid Carlberg’s biography Nobel. The Enigmatic Alfred is the result of archive research in five countries – as many languages as Nobel himself spoke – and a seasoned and passionate science journalist’s curiosity about the society and epoch that shaped the father of the Nobel Prize. It is a panorama of the technical and scientific achievements in the stormy political landscape of the 19th century, reflected in literature’s oscillations between brutal realism and lofty idealism. From that century and from Carlberg’s book emerges a full and complex portrait of Alfred, travelling engineer extraordinaire who also filled his notepad with lyrical poetry. Ingrid Carlberg (b. 1961) Nobel. The Enigmatic Alfred 660 p. Publisher Norstedts www.norstedts.se Rights Hedlund Literary Agency Martin Kaunitz martin@hedlundagency.se Selected works Pillret. En berättelse om depressioner och doktorer, forskare och Freud, människor och marknader, nonfiction, 2008 Det står ett rum här och väntar på dig…. Berättelsen om Raoul Wallenberg, nonfiction, 2012 Selected Literary Prizes Swedish Association of Science Journalism Prize for Good and Well-researched Science Journalism 2008 Svenska Carnegie Institutets journalistpris 2009 Augustpriset 2012 non-fiction Axel Hirschs pris 2013 (from the Swedish Academy) Photo: Kajsa Göransson