2015:2

It was with extreme sadness that Laurie Thompson’s many friends and colleagues learned of his death this summer.The part he has played in the promotion of Swedish literature in the UK is immense and at Swedish Book Review we owe him a very special debt of gratitude: when SELTA was offered the opportunity to take over Swedish Books in 1983, Laurie volunteered for the task.The rest, as they say, is history: he changed the name to Swedish Book Review and went on to edit it for twenty years.The journal went from strength to strength, and without his dedication and vision, and that of his successor Sarah Death, who was at the helm from 2003 until 2015, we would not be reading it today. Just as we were finalising this issue we received further sad news that our long-serving advisory editor and active contributor, Helena Forsås-Scott, had passed away, and here we acknowledge two enormous losses to Swedish literature in the UK and beyond.

On 20 March 2015 the journal of the Swedish book trade, Svensk bokhandel, published a statement from the Swedish Institute for Children’s Books that the annual analysis of Swedish children’s literature output showed 2014 to be a record year. Similarly The Bookseller reported on 5 May that, according to Nielsen BookScan, 2014 was a record year for children’s books in the UK, with sales increasing by 9.1% on the previous year. However, at around the same time in an article for English PEN sent from the Bologna Book Fair, translator Daniel Hahn, chair of the Society of Authors, sounded a warning note: ‘[. . .] in recent years our children’s publishing world has been as closed to work from other languages as it’s ever been’. In November 2014 SELTA organised a translation workshop on children’s and young adult literature, generously funded by the Swedish Arts Council, the Embassy of Sweden in London, University College London and the Anglo-Swedish Literary Foundation. In this issue we bring together extracts from the work of the five inspiring Swedish authors who participated in that event. SBR also looks at children’s books from the perspective of other actors in the book chain, in interviews with a respected book blogger and a successful publisher.

‘Possessing a world language can make us oddly provincial in outlook’: the words of Professor Marina Warner, chair of judges for the Man Booker International Prize (Guardian, 2 June 2015), pointing to the findings of a recent report from Literature Across Frontiers, which showed that still just three per cent of books published in the UK were in translation. We examine what these statistics tell us about Swedish literary translation.

To complete our coverage in this issue, we include adult fiction in an extract from a highly original – and epic – trilogy, and, of course, a very exciting selection of new book reviews.