The first book by Selma Lagerlöf (1858–1940) is the story of Gösta Berling, a defrocked minister, and the “cavaliers” who live on a Swedish estate in the 1820s.

Originally published in 1910, this is the classic novel of the Swedish women’s suffrage movement. Its vividly and wittily portrayed gallery of diverse female campaigners comes together to form a sisterhood that throws itself into tireless campaigning. They clash with irate conservative opponents (of both sexes) and risk both limb and reputation to win their struggle for the vote. The main protagonist, a young female journalist who is unconventional, bold and wily, finds that the trauma of love and the demands of friendship can be complicated distractions from the task in hand.

New edition 2021!

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.