Elin Wägner

Elin Matilda Elisabet Wägner (May 16, 1882 – January 7, 1949) was a Swedish writer, journalist, feminist, teacher, ecologist and pacifist. She was a member of the Swedish Academy from 1944.

Wägner's books and articles focus on the subjects of women's emancipation, civil rights, votes for women, the peace movement, welfare, and environmental pollution. She is best known for her commitment to the women's suffrage movement in Sweden, Swedish Society for Woman Suffrage, for founding the Swedish organization Rädda Barnen (the Swedish chapter of the International Save the Children Alliance) and for developing the women's citizen school at Fogelstad (where she was also a teacher on civil rights).

Alongside Fredrika Bremer, Wägner is often seen as th

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Victoria Benedictsson

See also pseudonym: Ernst Ahlgren

Victoria Benedictsson (March 6, 1850, Domme – July 21, 1888) was a Swedish author. She was born as Victoria Maria Bruzelius in Domme, a village in the province of Skåne. She wrote under the pen name Ernst Ahlgren.

Benedictsson grew up on a farm in Sweden. At 21 she married a 49-year-old widower from Hörby. Benedictsson was not happy in her marriage and had a love affair with the Danish critic and scholar Georg Brandes. The unhappy love affair has often been blamed for her subsequent suicide, but she was also very unhappy with the intellectually limited life she led. She is, together with August Strindberg, regarded as one of the greatest proponents of the Swedish realist writing style. In her novels she descr
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Raymond Carver

Carver was born into a poverty-stricken family at the tail-end of the Depression. He married at 19, started a series of menial jobs and his own career of 'full-time drinking as a serious pursuit', a career that would eventually kill him. Constantly struggling to support his wife and family, Carver enrolled in a writing programme under author John Gardner in 1958. He saw this opportunity as a turning point.

Rejecting the more experimental fiction of the 60s and 70s, he pioneered a precisionist realism reinventing the American short story during the eighties, heading the line of so-called 'dirty realists' or 'K-mart realists'. Set in trailer parks and shopping malls, they are stories of banal lives that turn on a seemingly insignificant detai
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Karin Boye

Karin Boye was a Swedish poet and novelist.

She is perhaps most famous for her poems, of which the most well-known ought to be "Yes, of course it hurts" (Swedish: "Ja visst gör det ont") and "In motion" (Swedish: "I rörelse"). She also wrote a few novels including "Kallocain". Inspired by the rise of National Socialism in Germany, it was a portrayal of a dystopian society in the vein of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Huxley's Brave New World (though written almost a decade before Nineteen Eighty-Four). In the novel, an idealistic scientist named Leo Kall invents Kallocain, a kind of truth serum.

Boye died in an apparent suicide when swallowing sleeping-pills after leaving home on April 23, 1941.
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Selma Lagerlöf

Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf (1858-1940) was a Swedish author. In 1909 she became the first woman to ever receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, "in appreciation of the lofty idealism, vivid imagination and spiritual perception that characterize her writings". She later also became the first female member of the Swedish Academy.

Born in the forested countryside of Sweden she was told many of the classic Swedish fairytales, which she would later use as inspiration in her magic realist writings. Since she for some of her early years had problems with her legs (she was born with a faulty hip) she would also spend a lot of time reading books such as the Bible.

As a young woman she was a teacher in the southern parts of Sweden for ten years befo
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Tove Jansson

Tove Jansson was born and died in Helsinki, Finland. As a Finnish citizen whose mother tongue was Swedish, she was part of the Swedish-speaking Finns minority. Thus, all her books were originally written in Swedish.

Although known first and foremost as an author, Tove Jansson considered her careers as author and painter to be of equal importance.

Tove Jansson wrote and illustrated her first Moomin book, The Moomins and the Great Flood (1945), during World War II. She said later that the war had depressed her, and she had wanted to write something naive and innocent. Besides the Moomin novels and short stories, Tove Jansson also wrote and illustrated four original and highly popular picture books.

Jansson's Moomin books have been translated in
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Annie Ernaux

The author of some twenty works of fiction and memoir, Annie Ernaux is considered by many to be France’s most important writer. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She has also won the Prix Renaudot for A Man's Place and the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her body of work. More recently she received the International Strega Prize, the Prix Formentor, the French-American Translation Prize, and the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation for The Years, which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2019. Her other works include Exteriors, A Girl's Story, A Woman's Story, The Possession, Simple Passion, Happening, I Remain in Darkness, Shame, A Frozen Woman, and A Man's Place.
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Hjalmar Söderberg

Hjalmar Emil Fredrik Söderberg was a Swedish novelist, playwright, poet and journalist. His works often deal with melancholy and lovelorn characters, and offer a rich portrayal of contemporary Stockholm through the eyes of the flaneur. Söderberg is greatly appreciated in his native country, and is sometimes considered to be the equal of August Strindberg, Sweden's national author.
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Victoria Benedictsson

See also pseudonym: Ernst Ahlgren

Victoria Benedictsson (March 6, 1850, Domme – July 21, 1888) was a Swedish author. She was born as Victoria Maria Bruzelius in Domme, a village in the province of Skåne. She wrote under the pen name Ernst Ahlgren.

Benedictsson grew up on a farm in Sweden. At 21 she married a 49-year-old widower from Hörby. Benedictsson was not happy in her marriage and had a love affair with the Danish critic and scholar Georg Brandes. The unhappy love affair has often been blamed for her subsequent suicide, but she was also very unhappy with the intellectually limited life she led. She is, together with August Strindberg, regarded as one of the greatest proponents of the Swedish realist writing style. In her novels she descr
Buy books on Amazon
Hjalmar Bergman

Hjalmar Bergman was a Swedish writer and playwright.

The son of a banker in Örebro, Bergman briefly studied philosophy at Uppsala University but soon broke off his studies and took up the life of a free writer. He married Stina Lindberg, the daughter of actor and stage producer August Lindberg and Augusta Lindberg, and sister of Per Lindberg. Up to his father's death in 1915 Bergman was heavily sponsored by the family patriarch; after the old man died from a stroke it turned out that the family business had become highly indebted and Bergman was forced to start making money out of his writing and court readers in a more outgoing and more entertaining manner. He rose to the challenge and in the following ten years reached the peak of his work
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Nina Björk

Nina Björk is a Swedish journalist, author and feminist. She is most well known for Under det rosa täcket (Under the Pink Duvet), a feminist book written in 1996.

She is considered to be a postmodern equity feminist. In 2008 she earned her PhD degree in literary criticism at Gothenburg University with her doctorate thesis Fria själar. She is also well known as a columnist in Dagens Nyheter.
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Sara Kadefors

Sara Kadefors writes for both teens and adults. She lives in Stockholm, Sweden.
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Kerstin Thorvall

Kerstin Thorvall is one of Sweden's most renowned authors, who also became one of Sweden's most criticized, as well as mostly read authors. Her books, especially The Most Forbidden (Det mest förbjudna) gave name to a whole genre, the so called "Confession literature". But the appreciation for her authorship increased for every year, partly through her memoir trilogy with the titles Hilma's Sacrifice, In the Shadow of Anxiety, and From Signe to Alberte.
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Per Anders Fogelström

Per Anders Fogelström was among the leading figures in modern Swedish literature. He spent his whole life in Stockholm, and the most famous of his many works is a series of novels set in the city he dearly loved.

Ingmar Bergman's taboo-breaking 1953 film Summer with Monika is based on Fogelström's novel of the same name, published in 1951.

The author of more than 40 books in total, Fogelström also served as director of the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society from 1963 to 1977. He received an honorary doctorate from Stockholm University in 1976. On the day he died, June 23, 1998, a bust of Fogelström was unveiled in Stockholm City Hall.
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Jens Lapidus

Jens Lapidus is a Swedish criminal defense lawyer and author, who made his writing debut in August 2006 with Snabba Cash. It is an account of the Stockholm underworld and the first of a planned trilogy called The Stockholm Noir Trilogy. Two years later the second installment, Aldrig Fucka Upp was published by Wahlström & Widstrand. A graphic novel with illustrator Peter Bergting (The Portent) entitled Gängkrig 145 was published May 2009. While this project does tie into his previous novels, it is not the third part of The Stockholm Noir Trilogy as some Swedish media has claimed. Lapidus' writing has been compared to James Ellroy and Dennis Lehane.

Series:
* The Stockholm Noir Trilogy
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Ingvild H. Rishøi

Ingvild H. Rishøi was born and raised in Oslo and hers is a wildly willful voice in fiction. She has consistently wowed readers with her pared down yet powerful storytelling, with an acute eye for the wonder of everyday life and for vulnerable characters at the fringes of society, not seldom children.

Her literary career began in 2007 with the release of the short story collection, Do Not Erase, which introduced her as a promising new voice in Norwegian literature. Her second collection of short stories, The Tale of Mrs Berg, published in 2011, was shortlisted for the prestigious Brage Prize.

In 2014, Rishøi received widespread acclaim and popular recognition for the short story collection Winter Stories. The book won the Critics’ Prize for b
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Lena Andersson

Lena Andersson (born 18 April 1970 in Stockholm) is a Swedish author and journalist. She won the August Prize in 2013 for the novel Wilful Disregard . In the same year, the same book, won her the Literature Prize given by the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet.
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Françoise Sagan

Born Françoise Quoirez, Sagan grew up in a French Catholic, bourgeois family. She was an independent thinker and avid reader as a young girl, and upon failing her examinations for continuing at the Sorbonne, she became a writer.

She went to her family's home in the south of France and wrote her first novel, Bonjour Tristesse, at age 18. She submitted it to Editions Juillard in January 1954 and it was published that March. Later that year, She won the Prix des Critiques for Bonjour Tristesse.

She chose "Sagan" as her pen name because she liked the sound of it and also liked the reference to the Prince and Princesse de Sagan, 19th century Parisians, who are said to be the basis of some of Marcel Proust's characters.

She was known for her love
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Gun-Britt Sundström

Gun-Britt Sundström är en svensk författare, översättare och litteraturkritiker.

Som författare är Sundström mest känd för Maken (1976), en diskussionsroman om parförhållanden, och För Lydia (1973), som återberättar Hjalmar Söderbergs Den allvarsamma leken med handlingen sedd ur kvinnans perspektiv och flyttad sextio år framåt i tiden. Sedan 90-talet är hon även verksam som översättare av barnböcker och skönlitteratur. Då hon 2003 utnämndes till hedersdoktor vid Stockholms universitet löd motiveringen bland annat: "hennes språkliga lyhördhet gör henne till en ypperlig översättare ... Genom sin medverkan i bibelkommissionen 1980-2000 har hon kommit att betyda mer för den stilistiska utformningen av Gamla Testamentets text än någon annan enski
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Han Kang

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

소설가 한강

Han Kang was born in 1970 in South Korea. She is the author of The Vegetarian, winner of the International Booker Prize, as well as Human Acts, The White Book, Greek Lessons, and We Do Not Part. In 2024, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”
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Anne Charlotte Leffler

Anne Charlotte Edgren-Leffler, duchess of Cajanello (October 1, 1849 - October 21, 1892), was a Swedish author.

She was the daughter of the school principal John Olof Leffler and Gustava Wilhelmina Mittag. Her brother was noted mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler.

Her first volume of stories appeared in 1869, but the first to which she attached her name was Ur lifvet ("From Life," 1882), a series of realistic sketches of the upper circles of Swedish society, followed, by three other collections with the same title. Her earliest plays, Skådespelerskan ("The Actress," 1873), and its successors, were produced anonymously in Stockholm, but in 1883 her reputation was established by the success of Sanna qvinnor ("True Women") and En räddande engel (
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Alfhild Agrell

Alfhild Teresia Agrell (January 14, 1849 in Härnösand, Ångermanland –November 8, 1923 in Flen) was a Swedish writer and playwright.

She temporarily used the pseudonyms Thyra, Lovisa Petterqvist and Stig Stigson, but she soon begun to use her own name, which was unusual for a woman; other famed female Swedish playwrights of the century, such as the sisters Louise and Jeanette Granberg, both used male pseudonyms. The subject that she concentrated on, sexual double standards, was very shocking for her time.

Alfhild Agrell was an important contributor to the cause of gender equality in regards of sexuality; in her work, she handles the questions and consequences of sexual injustice, the sexual double standards such as the fact that a woman is sub
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Annika Norlin

Stacken är Annika Norlins första roman. Novellsamlingen Jag ser allt du gör (2020) nominerades till Augustpriset, Borås Tidnings debutantpris, Norrlands litteraturpris och Katapultpriset för årets bästa skönlitterära debut.

Annika Norlin är också låtskrivare och artist, som släpper musik under eget namn, samt i projekten Säkert! och Hello Saferide.
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Andrev Walden

Andrev Igor Walden, född 14 maj 1976 i Mariefred, Södermanlands län, är en svensk författare, journalist och illustratör. Han skriver för Dagens Nyheter. Walden tilldelades Augustpriset 2023 för sin romandebut Jävla karlar, som också blev det årets bäst säljande svenska roman.
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Anne Charlotte Leffler

Anne Charlotte Edgren-Leffler, duchess of Cajanello (October 1, 1849 - October 21, 1892), was a Swedish author.

She was the daughter of the school principal John Olof Leffler and Gustava Wilhelmina Mittag. Her brother was noted mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler.

Her first volume of stories appeared in 1869, but the first to which she attached her name was Ur lifvet ("From Life," 1882), a series of realistic sketches of the upper circles of Swedish society, followed, by three other collections with the same title. Her earliest plays, Skådespelerskan ("The Actress," 1873), and its successors, were produced anonymously in Stockholm, but in 1883 her reputation was established by the success of Sanna qvinnor ("True Women") and En räddande engel (
Buy books on Amazon
Alfhild Agrell

Alfhild Teresia Agrell (January 14, 1849 in Härnösand, Ångermanland –November 8, 1923 in Flen) was a Swedish writer and playwright.

She temporarily used the pseudonyms Thyra, Lovisa Petterqvist and Stig Stigson, but she soon begun to use her own name, which was unusual for a woman; other famed female Swedish playwrights of the century, such as the sisters Louise and Jeanette Granberg, both used male pseudonyms. The subject that she concentrated on, sexual double standards, was very shocking for her time.

Alfhild Agrell was an important contributor to the cause of gender equality in regards of sexuality; in her work, she handles the questions and consequences of sexual injustice, the sexual double standards such as the fact that a woman is sub
Buy books on Amazon
Hjalmar Bergman

Hjalmar Bergman was a Swedish writer and playwright.

The son of a banker in Örebro, Bergman briefly studied philosophy at Uppsala University but soon broke off his studies and took up the life of a free writer. He married Stina Lindberg, the daughter of actor and stage producer August Lindberg and Augusta Lindberg, and sister of Per Lindberg. Up to his father's death in 1915 Bergman was heavily sponsored by the family patriarch; after the old man died from a stroke it turned out that the family business had become highly indebted and Bergman was forced to start making money out of his writing and court readers in a more outgoing and more entertaining manner. He rose to the challenge and in the following ten years reached the peak of his work
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Sara Martinsson

Sara Martinsson är frilansjournalist och tyngdlyftningstränare. Hon skriver om musik, kultur och träning i bland annat DN och Arbetet.
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Elisabeth Beskow

Elisabeth Beskow wrote more than 50 novels and children's stories under the pseudonym Runa. During the early 1900s, she was the second most read female writer in Sweden (Selma Lagerlöf being the first). The novels are coloured by a strong religious-idealistic conception of life, and often with a clear moral and edifying structure.
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