New Swedish Books, Spring 2018 1
37 Spring 2018 Linnéa Axelsson (b. 1980) Ædnan Pu
blisher Albert Bonniers förlag www.albertbonniersforlag.se Rights Albert Bonniers förlag daniel.sandstrom@ albertbonniers.se Works Tvillingsmycket novel 2010 Ædnan Seldom has epic scope been married with spare style as in Linnéa Axelsson’s extended poem Ædnan. Over 750 pages she relates the fortunes of a few Saami families from the early twentieth century to today, but everything is told just a few words at a time, in poems as short as breaths. Reindeer and reindeer herders move across the mountainsides and frozen rivers, a landscape that been changed, over the years, by the road building projects and hydroelectric dams of the Swedish majority population. A Saami nation falls apart. A people is humiliated by skull-measuring eugenicists and driven from their lands. Linnéa Axelsson allows the pain spots in the lives of individuals to combine to form a larger and deeper history of Sápmi and of Sweden. It justifies the subtitle ”epic“. Photo: Sara Mac Key