2009:2

Some of us were lucky enough to be at the Edinburgh International Book Festival this August as the long-nurtured project to feature a cross-section of Swedish writers in its 2009 programme reached fruition (see page 60). The Swedish group was certainly a diverse one, containing everyone from essayists and poets to an internationally famous crime writer. Writing in The Guardian a few days later about the event as a whole, Alan Bissett reported that Scottish author James Kelman had lambasted his country’s literary establishment during the Festival for ‘the crime-ification of Scottish letters’ and for praising mediocre commercial fiction. Bissett saw this as ‘a manifestation of the old "genre v real literature" debate’, but urged writers such as Kelman to keep speaking out for new ways of expressing and thinking about ourselves. A similar literary debate is ruffling feathers in Sweden this autumn, following the publication by seven relatively young writers of a ‘Manifesto For a New Literary Decade', humorous in tone, but keen to promote discussion of, to take one example, the extent to which epic storytelling has been annexed by crime fiction and so-called chick-lit. The document prompted a counter-manifesto signed by no fewer than 32 other writers, and many column inches ensued from both sides of the debate. As author of this year’s edition of the annual literary round-up New Swedish Titles (shortly available in English on the Swedish Arts Council website), Annina Raabe sees the debate in positive terms: ‘Whatever else we may conclude from the manifesto and its aftermath, it certainly indicates one thing: young Swedish writers of today are not lacking in literary awareness, and are more than ready to get involved in heated debates about what is possible in literature.’ In this issue of SBR we are unashamedly helping ourselves from both sides of the arena. With the authors’ permission, we are pleased to bring you, as an SBR exclusive, an English translation of the manifesto. We also feature an extract from the work of one of the manifesto’s signatories: Sven Olov Karlsson’s The American House brings us traditional storytelling at its best. As the British bookselling community winds itself up for the imminent release of the third and final part of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, we give our own nod to the crime fiction genre with an extract from a new work by Anna Bovaller. Also to be sampled in this issue: the brittle despair of a woman acting out the roles of wife and mother in a disintegrating marriage in an extract from Kristina Sandberg’s latest novel; and the enduringly popular memoirs of a happy-go-lucky, young Swedish woman by the name of Birgitta Stenberg, abroad in the 1950s, socialising with Robert Graves and his circle in Majorca. To complete the cocktail we bring you quirky verses and wacky illustrations by the team of Stella Parland and Linda Bondestam, in the nonsense tradition of Edward Lear and Dr Seuss.