Emma Olsson

Johannes Anyuru is a master of portraying contemporary Western European city life with poetic tenderness. With his latest novel, he takes us to a working-class immigrant neighbourhood in Antwerp, where a mother grapples with the dissolving boundaries of the life she has created for her son.

Nominated for 2023 Nordic Council Literature Prize, A Book For Nobody surprises and delights thanks to Isabella Nilsson’s playful approach to writing about difficult topics.

If you partake in something you know is wrong and later write about it, can any value be extracted from the prose? Or is it simply wrong? August Prize-nominated Morality by Lyra Ekström Lindbäck unfolds like a thesis centred on this and other philosophical questions.

Karl Kofi Ahlqvist’s Restless Nights is a quietly powerful debut. The novel follows a man in his early twenties as he tries to make ends meet, flitting between part-time work and dating older women for money.

Karolina Ramqvist’s The First Book weaves through different tenses and times, interlacing stories like sections of a long braid. There are many lenses through which one could read it, and Ramqvist never sticks to just one.