Kerstin Ekman, one of Sweden’s most highly-esteemed living writers, writes  with great love and admiration of a full year in Northern Sweden during which a puppy is separate from both his master and his mother but manages to survive in the wild.

A self-centred little man with a propeller on his back, living on the roof of your block of flats? If you are a lonely little boy like Smidge, all sorts of adventures await when you team up with such a wayward troublemaker. This rumbustious classic of Swedish children’s literature and its two sequels are now available in new translations for the twenty-first century.

ISBN 9780192727725.

Yvonne Hirdman’s biography of Alva Myrdal is an intimate, rounded portrait of one of the great women of the twentieth century.

The Director is Ingmar Bergman; the time is 1961; and the setting is the shooting of Winter Light, a film about how his life would have been if he had heeded his father’s wishes and become a priest. Gradually the visionary film-maker shapes the story on the screen, but the project is unpopular, money is short, the light is poor, and Bergman’s sense of reality begins to crack.

This work of fiction, steeped in fact, is written in pared-down language that calls on the translator constantly to deconstruct the text and piece it back together. It is like translating poetry or an extended prose poem.

I Studied Once At a Wonderful Faculty is a trilogy comprising Snow Leopard (1987), The Parks (1992) and After Spending a Night Among Horses (1997), coupled with a new cycle of poems, Minerals. Forsström’s poetry draws its sonorous and plangent music from the landscapes of Finland, seeking harmony between the troubled human heart and the threatened natural world. As Sweden’s August Prize jury commented, this is poetry ‘both melancholy and impassioned’, expressing a ‘struggle against meaninglessness, disintegration, destruction – against death in life’.

The translation of After Spending a Night Among Horses is by Stina Katchadourian.

‘Icy intensity…aphoristic as well as mystical…a fragility that is wholly particular…Forsström’s visions of loneliness and despair are tempered by a lyrical pluckiness…the tenderness of snow’ – Adam Thorpe, Observer.

‘Tua Forsström’s poems give a sense of having crystallised under a great pressure…a survey of the landscape of grief, exercises in renunciation and in the affirmation of loss of love, sexuality and communion with others…She belongs to a tradition that includes Rilke, Hölderlin, Paul Celan and the great Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf’ – Claes Andersson.

‘Forsström has a superb ability to use the everyday and the practical to get closer to the most complicated elements of life. Her language constantly goes through changes allowing the usual meanings of the words to be replaced by new insights which are a kind of magic ritual. Just like a Native American shaman, she can surely bring forth rain with her poetry if she wishes’ – Gustaf Widén, Hofvustadsbladet.

In Urwind, on the face of it a simple tale of a Helsinki antiquarian bookseller whose wife has left him, there is a complex layering of experience, past and present. The telling is more a matter of inner than outer events –  intimate, rapt.

In the `ur-vind’, or primordial attic, are stored not only relics from the story-teller’s past, but also memories of the neighbours, friends and relations who inhabited the apartment house in which he was brought up. The `ur-vind’ is also the cosmic wind, blowing from beyond the reassuring walls of houses and apartments. And it is the story-teller’s name Daniel Urwind, in whom is focused a wealth of literary and artistic allusions and antecedents that include the Merz-Bau of Kurt Schwitters, the paintings of Cézanne and the fiction of Kafka.

Jakob Törn, a frustrated and becalmed small-town apothecary in Sweden in 1718, finds himself called upon to cope with an influx of starving soldiers from a defeated army, and then to help with the embalming of his own dead monarch.  Winner of the Bernard Shaw Prize for translation from Swedish, it was longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Award.

Martin Birck’s Youth is a book rich in fin-de-siècle themes: melancholy, eroticism and decadence abound. The Stockholm depicted here is a haunting city of shadows and snowstorms, suppressed passion and loneliness. The novel traces the development of the title character from a seemingly idyllic childhood to maturity as a thirty-year-old man, an introspective outsider, critical of society, constantly searching for the truth but going through a gradual process of disillusionment.

Anne-Marie is a middle-aged woman returning to the Swedish town where she grew up to sell the old house she has inherited from her father. Memories of the past are everywhere, ensnaring her.

Born severely disabled and without the ability to walk or talk, Desirée is an “April Wtich,” clairvoyant and omniscient and cable of following the world through the eyes of both other people and animals. Addressing the themes of mother-daughter relationships, competition between women and the shortcomings of the post-war Swedish welfare state, April witch is a thrilling, fascinating story.

The second volume of the Women and the City tetralogy, The Spring follows the women the reader encountered in Witches’ Rings, mainly through the years between the World Wars.

Kerstin Ekman, one of the foremost living Swedish authors, began what became a tetralogy commonly referred to as Women in the City, with this volume in 1997. it opens in the 1870s, and follows the women of a small community as it grows, thanks to the advent of the railroad, among other changes.

His work is featured in David McDuff’s Finland-Swedish anthology Ice Around Our Lips: ‘Gösta Ågren is the real discovery: an Ostrobothnian quasi-separatist Marxist, he is heavily influenced by R.S. Thomas, but his taut, muscley, short lines remind me, too, of Edward Bond, prismed through a totally Finland-Swedish consciousness… Gösta Ågren has absorbed his modernist predecessors…tough, but compassionate… abstract and imagistic and sensual. He feels like a major poet.’ – Adam Thorpe, Poetry Review. A Valley in the Midst of Violence is based mainly on the collections Cloud Summer (Molnsommar, 1978), Poems in Black and White (Dikter i svartvitt, 1980), That Which Always Is (Det som alltid är, 1982), and The Other God (Den andre guden, 1985). The poems are grouped by Ågren in titled sections which refer to theme, and are not the titles of the original collections.

Fredrika Bremer was a nineteenth-century writing sensation, her bestselling novels and travel books instantly translated into a range of other European languages. This early work shows she was never afraid to abandon the prevailing conventions of insipid romantic fiction to explore the social and moral problems facing women. This novel also has one of the most interesting narrators one could wish to meet: the plain-speaking but perceptive housekeeper Beata Hvardagslag, called back to the family to cook up a solution to their problems, Metaphors of kitchen and household abound in her astonishingly modern, metacritical approach to storytelling.

Mirjam Tuominen was a major poet and short story writer, as well as a distinguished essayist, translator and artist. Her work progressed through traditional prose, modernist poetry and abstract painting to Roman Catholic mysticism. She is one of the trio of great Nordic women poets, along with Edith Södergran and Karin Boye – all three published in English by Bloodaxe Books.

Her stories are often about love’s intensity, its eroticism and tenderness, about jealousy and struggles for power between men and women. They are acute in their depiction of small town life in Finland in the 1940s, and in capturing her sense of dread at the alarming upsurge of Nazi sympathies during the War. Everything she wrote afterwards was scarred by the horror of the Holocaust, and in particular by one news story of a German soldier who threw a Jewish boy into a sewer because the boy cried when the soldier was whipping his mother. Tuominen had a frightening, self-destructive ability to react directly to the suffering of others, and much of her poetry can be traced back to her anguished response to this one incident. Her poems are obsessive in confronting guilt, vulnerability and power, in their searching for absolute truth in a world she saw as split between victims and tormentors.

Tuominen was drawn to writers who were vulnerable and tormented outsiders. She translated their work, and wrote powerful studies of figures such as Kafka, Rilke, Proust, Hölderlin and Cora Sandel. Her essays shows the extent of her identification with them: ‘Kafka must have felt the conflict between the demands of his inner being and those of the world around him with an extreme and almost intolerable intensity.’

David McDuff’s edition includes selections from Mirjam Tuominen’s poetry and stories, as well as her seminal essay Victim and Tormentor. The book is introduced by her daughter, the writer Tuva Korsström.

Karin Boye is one of the most distinguished poets of modern Swedish literature. Her poetry is naturally mystical and possesses great intellectual clarity, containing both ‘the softness of the flower and the brittle toughness of the ice-crystal’. — Lauri Viljanen

The Cool Day (1961), The Courtyard (1969) and Years Like Leaves (1989) are combined in Homecoming, translated by David McDuff, who also translated Carpelan’s classic novel Axel (Carcanet, 1989; Paladin, 1990). The Courtyard poems are enriched with memories of his 1930s childhood in Helsingfors, the verse rooted in a specific place and time.