Translator: Alice Menzies
Author: Ann Heberlein
Publisher: House of Anansi / Pushkin Press
Year of Publication: 2021
A timely, dramatic biography that explores how Hannah Arendt’s personal experience shaped her indispensable work on totalitarianism, refugees and the nature of love and evil.
Translator: Brad Harmon
Author: Måns Mosesson
Publisher: Sphere/Mobius
Year of Publication: 2021
Tim – The Official Biography of Avicii is written by the award-winning journalist Måns Mosesson, who, through interviews with Tim’s family, friends and colleagues in the music business, has intimately gotten to know the star producer. The book paints an honest picture of Tim and his search in life, not shying from the difficulties that he struggled with.
“Tim Bergling was a musical visionary who, through his sense for melodies, came to define the era when Swedish and European house music took over the world. But Tim Bergling was also an introverted and fragile young man who was forced to grow up at an inhumanly fast pace. After a series of emergencies resulting in hospital stays, he stopped touring in the summer of 2016. Barely two years later, he took his own life at the age of twenty-eight.
Tim – The Official Biography of Avicii is written by the award-winning journalist Måns Mosesson, who, through interviews with Tim’s family, friends and colleagues in the music business, has intimately gotten to know the star producer. The book paints an honest picture of Tim and his search in life, not shying from the difficulties that he struggled with.
It’s almost impossible to grasp how big an impact Tim Bergling had, both on the music industry at large and on his fans all over the world. The author, Måns Mosesson, has travelled in Tim’s footsteps across the globe, from the streets of his childhood in Stockholm, to Miami, Ibiza and Los Angeles, in order to provide an in-depth and multifaceted picture of Tim’s life and works.
Måns Mosesson is an award-winning investigative journalist with a background as a documentary producer and in-depth reporter.
Avicii AB’s net proceeds from Tim – The Official Biography of Avicii will be donated in full to the Tim Bergling Foundation, in order to support the foundation’s cause: the prevention of mental health issues and suicide.” (from publisher’s website)
Translator: Saskia Vogel
Author: Linda Boström Knausgård
Publisher: World Editions
Year of Publication: 2021
A fight against the dark
From 2013 to 2017, the narrator was periodically interned in a psychiatric ward where she was subjected to electroconvulsive therapy. As the treatments at this “factory” progressed, the writer’s memories began to disappear. What good is a writer without her memory? This novel, based on the author’s experiences, is an eloquent and profound attempt to hold on to the past, to create a story, to make sense, and to keep alive ties to family, friends, and even oneself. Moments from childhood, youth, marriage, parenting, and divorce flicker across the pages of October Child. This is the story of one woman’s struggle against mental illness and isolation. It is a raw testimony of how writing can preserve and heal.
Translator: David McDuff
Author: Tua Forsström
Publisher: Bloodaxe
Year of Publication: 2021
In some sense a continuation of the previous collection, Forsström’s new book focuses more acutely on the themes of death and grief, and in particular the devastating loss of her beloved granddaughter. It shows her poetry’s tone of inner discourse shifting imperceptibly towards a new and harsh gravity.
I Walked On into the Forest is her twelfth book of poetry, her first since One Evening in October I Rowed Out on the Lake (2012/2015), the collection which followed her celebrated trilogy, I Studied Once at a Wonderful Faculty (2003), published in English translation by Bloodaxe in 2006.
In some sense a continuation of the previous collection, Forsström’s new book focuses more acutely on the themes of death and grief, and in particular the devastating loss of her beloved granddaughter. It shows her poetry’s tone of inner discourse shifting imperceptibly towards a new and harsh gravity. As Sweden’s August Prize jury commented on her work as a whole, this is poetry ‘both melancholy and impassioned’, expressing a ‘struggle against meaninglessness, disintegration, destruction – against death in life’.
From the reviews of I Walked On into the Forest (Anteckningar):
‘Forsström has Finland-Swedish modernism in her bloodstream but has kept a coolly timeless tone in her poetry. Her style can with some reason be called classical… What we read slowly reveals its true poetic face – the face of the lament, the elegy… It’s most beautifully and bravely done.’ – Magnus Ringgren, Aftonbladet, Sweden
‘Tua Forsström writes poetry that comes stealing up on you. There is something curious about her poems, a way of adhering to the world that is hard to put one’s finger on.’ – Hadle Oftedal Andersen, Klassekampen, Norway
‘Tua Forsström’s poems have a habit of transforming themselves each time one comes back to them.’ – Erik Skyum Nielsen, Information, Denmark
‘I don’t know what I am going to need on the day that I have to face major loss, but I’m already writing a reminder to myself to go to the bookshelf then and pick out all of Tua Forsström’s books.’ – Anna-Lina Brunell, Hufvudstadsbladet, Finland
Translator: Annie Prime
Author: Yens Wahlgren
Publisher: The History Press
Year of Publication: 2021
A fascinating exploration of invented languages from Esperanto to Elvish.
If you think about it, all languages are made up – some are just more open about it than others.
In The Universal Translator, Yens Wahlgren heads up an expedition through time, space and multiple universes to explore the words that have built worlds. From the classic constructed languages of Star Trek and Tolkien to (literally) Orwellian Newspeak and pop-culture sensations such as Game of Thrones, The Witcher and The Mandalorian, this is your portal to over a hundred realms and lexicons – and perhaps the starting point to creating your own.
Translator: Alex Fleming
Author: Katrine Marçal
Publisher: William Collins
Year of Publication: 2021
A razor-sharp look at the ways women –and their game changing ideas– are excluded from the global economy.
Why did it take us 5,000 years to attach wheels to a suitcase? How did bras take us to the moon? And what does whale hunting have to do with our economy?
Bestselling author Katrine Marçal reveals the shocking ways our deeply ingrained ideas about gender continue to hold us back. Every day, extraordinary inventions and innovative ideas are side-lined in a world that remains subservient to men.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. From the beginning of time, women have been pivotal to our society, offering ingenious solutions to some of our most vexing problems. More recently, it is women who have transformed the way we shop online, revolutionised the lives of disabled people and put the climate crisis at the top of the agenda.
Despite these successes, we still fail to find and fund the game-changing ideas that could alter the future of our planet, giving just 3% of venture capital to female founders. Instead, ingrained ideas about men and women continue to shape our economic decisions; favouring men and leading us to the same tired set of solutions.
For too long we have underestimated the consequences of sexism in our economy, and the way it holds all of us – women and men – back. Katrine Marcal’s blistering critique sets the record straight and shows how, in a time of crisis, the ingenuity and intelligence of women is that very thing that can save us.
Translator: Alex Fleming
Author: Camilla Sten
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Year of Publication: 2021
The Blair Witch Project meets Midsommar in this brilliantly disturbing thriller from Camilla Sten, an electrifying new voice in suspense.
Documentary filmmaker Alice Lindstedt has been obsessed with the vanishing residents of the old mining town, dubbed “The Lost Village,” since she was a little girl. In 1959, her grandmother’s entire family disappeared in this mysterious tragedy, and ever since, the unanswered questions surrounding the only two people who were left—a woman stoned to death in the town center and an abandoned newborn—have plagued her. She’s gathered a small crew of friends in the remote village to make a film about what really happened.
But there will be no turning back.
Not long after they’ve set up camp, mysterious things begin to happen. Equipment is destroyed. People go missing. As doubt breeds fear and their very minds begin to crack, one thing becomes startlingly clear to Alice:
They are not alone.
They’re looking for the truth…
But what if it finds them first?
Come find out.
Translator: Alice Menzies
Author: Jonas Hassen Khemiri
Publisher: Harvill Secker / FSG
Year of Publication: 2020
“… a tender, funny and bruising novel about what it means to be a good parent, the difficulty of understanding those closest to us, and how it sometimes takes courage just to stick around. An ode to families, their dynamics, their boundaries and their silences, in all their messy glory, it reveals one of the real challenges in life: how to stop your family defining your destiny.”
Finalist 2020 National Book Award for Translated Literature
Longlisted for the 2021 Pen Translation Prize
Translator: B.J. Woodstein
Author: Ylva Hillström and Karin Eklund
Publisher: Alfabeta and Moderna Museet
Year of Publication: 2020
A children’s book about the artist Hilma af Klint.
