Selection of the most recent applications granted support from the Swedish Arts Council.

Göteborg Book Fair together with the Swedish Arts Council has once again provided support to publishers and literary agents from outside the Nordic region for attending the fair September 22 – 25.

Carmen Giorgetti Cima is the 2011 recipient of the Swedish Academy Award for interpretation. This prize, established in 1965, is awarded in recognition of valuable intepretation of Swedish literature to a foreign language. The award sum is SEK 60,000.

More Swedish and Nordic authors than ever before have been invited to attend the Paris book fair, Salon du Livre. Considered the most important annual literary event in France, it takes place this year between 18 and 21 March. Under the heading Les Lettres Nordiques, 40 Nordic authors will participate in debates and seminars, the largest number ever.

Inti Chavez Perez has been awarded the 2011 Slangbellan (Slingshot) his book Respekt – En sexbok för killar (Respect, a sex book for guys) Alfabeta. This book discusses subjects including the role of young men, yes and no signals, being hetero, homo or bi, and why respect results in better love, sex and relationships.

Selection of the most recent applications granted support from the Swedish Arts Council.

En dåre fri (A Lunatic Liberated) by Beate Grimsrud has been awarded the Swedish Radio Fiction Prize for 2011.The jury’s citation: for a keen, powerful reading experience. The voices in the narrative stick with you long after you have closed the book.

Beate Grimsrud was born and grew up in Norway, but has lived in Stockholm since 1984. Her first published work was a collection of short stories: Det finns gränser för vad jag inte förstår (There are Limits to What I don’t Understand), published in 1989.

Grimsrud wrote En dåre fri in Swedish and Norwegian, in parallel, and thus the original was published simultaneously in both language. It has been nominated by both Sweden and Norway as their submissions for the annual Nordic Council Literature Prize. It has already received the Norwegian Literary Critics’ Award.

This year’s first publication prize from the newspaper Borås Tidning, has been awarded to poet Helena Österlund for her collection of poetry entitled: Ordet och Färgerna (The Word and the Colors). The prize sum is SEK 100,000. Helena Österlund was born in 1978 and lives in Stockholm. She was the only poet among the five nominees.

The 2011 Karl Vennberg prize, of SEK 100,000 has been awarded by the academy Samfundet De Nio to Göran Greider. Greider’s first volume of poetry, Vid fönstret står ensamheten ut (At the Window Loneliness Finds Life Bearable) was published in 1981. Since then he has written more than twenty books, the latest of which was published in 2010 and is entitled Det måste finnas en väg ut ur det här samhället (There Must be a Way Out of This Society).

Other recognition for 2011 from Samfundet De Nio was awarded to to:

• Beate Grimsrud received the Stina Aronsson prize of SEK 100,000 for her novel En Dåre fri (A Lunatic Liberated). En Dåre fri has also been nominated as the Swedish fiction title for this year’s Nordic Council Literature Prize.
• Magnus Dahlström, Magnus Florin, Oline Stig and Sara Stridsberg were awarded the academy’s Winter Prize, amounting to SEK 75,000.

A one-time award of SEK 75,000 was also made to author Augustin Mannerheim.

Samfundet de Nio is an academy that was established in 1913 and has nine members, who are elected for life.

Elena Balzamo has been awarded the 2011 Pris Sévigné for her translation of the letters of August Strindberg, volume 1, from Swedish into French, published by Editions Zulma. The Sevigné prize is awarded annually for a previously unpublished collection of letters, under the auspices of La Fondation d’Entreprise de La and Hermès, in collaboration with a festival with a focus on the genre of letter-writing, Le Festival de la Correspondance de Grignan.

Johanna Lindbäck, with her novel Saker som aldrig händer (Things that Never Happen) is Sweden’s nominee to this year’s Nordic Prize for Fiction for Children and Young Adults.

In 2012, funding from the Swedish Arts Council will have a particular focus on works by author and playwright August Strindberg, who died in 1912.

Per Olov Enquist’s Another Life has been selected best autobiography of the year by the French magazine Lire. Nominated in the same category were Patti Smith’s Just Kids and André Brink’s Mes bifurcations.

Selection of the most recent translations granted support from the Swedish Arts Council.  

The nominees for the 2011 Swedish Radio Fiction Award have been announced.
The nominees are:
Magnus Florin: Ränderna, Albert Bonniers förlag
Beate Grimsrud: En dåre fri, Albert Bonniers förlag
Kristina Sandberg: Att föda ett barn, Norstedts förlag
Oline Stig: Jupiters öga, Albert Bonniers förlag
Aino Trossel: Hjärtblad, Norstedts förlag
Peter Törnqvist: Kioskvridning 140 grader, Norstedts förlag

The winner will be announced on March 7.

Sweden is the country of honour at the 2010 Belgrade book fair, taking place from October 25 to October 31. Twenty Swedish writers will be attending the book fair and hundreds of books of contemporary Swedish literature published in the past six years will be presented within the project Voices from Sweden.

Sigrid Combüchen’s  Spill (Waste) received the August Prize for best Swedish novel.  Yvonne Hirdman won the prize in the non-fiction category and Jenny Jägerfeldt received the prize for best Swedish children’s book of the year.  

The August Prize is the largest literary award in Sweden and is founded by the Swedish Publishers’ Association.

Mikael Engström’s Isdraken (The Ice Dragon) has been nominated for the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis 2010.

Göteborg Book Fair together with the Swedish Arts Council has once again provided
support to publishers and literary agents from outside the Nordic region for attending the fair
September 23–26.