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Linnea Axelsson wins Norrlands Litteraturpris 2019

Posted on 09/07/2019 in Awards

Linnea Axelsson’s powerful verse novel Aednan wins Norrlands Litteraturpris (Norrland’s Literature Award) for Fiction.

The book has previously won the August Prize for Fiction in 2018, Studieförbundet Vuxenskolan’s Fiction Award, Ordfront Award for Democracy, and Svenska Dagbladet Prize for Literature. It was also shortlisted for Swedish Radio’s Poetry Prize.

In Aednan, Linnea Axelsson narrates the story of three generations of two indigenous Sámi families in northern Sweden, whose fate mirrors Sámi history from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day.

We join the struggling family as they herd their reindeer towards summer pasture on an island in northern Norway. None of them can imagine that soon enough the Norwegian border will be closed to them, that they will be forced from their home, and future generations will encounter altogether different challenges. Piece by piece, an emotional landscape emerges as the families lives are impacted by Sweden’s colonial policy.

The Sámi people are the indigenous pastoral people of the north, their lands spanning the far northern tips of Norway, Sweden, Finland and parts of Russia, and who traditionally make their living from herding reindeer.

Ædnan is the traditional northern Sámi word for ’land’, ’ground’, or ’earth’.