Carl-Johan Vallgren is awarded the Palle Rosenkrantz Prize for Best Foreign Crime novel/Thriller!
From the jury: Your Time will Come is an existential crime novel full of presence and pain—and suspense.
Your Time will Come was also chosen by the Swedish Crime Writers’ Academy as the Best Crime Novel of the Year in 2024.
The Kellgren prize is given for significant contributions within the entire field of the Swedish Academy’s activities.
In recent years, the recipients of the prize were Suzanne Osten (2021), Anders Cullhed (2022), Svante Nordin (2023), and Inger Johansson (2024).
From the Academy’s motivation: “Her wide-ranging authorship moves between poetry, essays, and scholarship, and has been praised for its ability to combine stylistic elegance and humor with profound learning.”
Among the prizes and distinctions awarded to Nina Burton are the Gerard Bonnier Essay Prize, the Grand Non-Fiction Book Prize, the Swedish Academy’s Essay Prize, the Övralid Prize, and His Majesty the King’s Medal of the 8th Size in the Order of the Seraphim.
The prize for Best Swedish Debut is awarded to a distinguished newcomer to the genre. Since 2020, the Swedish reading group nominates up to five debut authors in the genre. Previous recipients include Negar Naseh & David Sandström, Åke Edwardson and Håkan Nesser.
The jury’s motivation:
“A powerful portrayal of a family falling apart, where the unexpected is constantly lurking around the corner.”
We’re proud to share that Johan Rundberg and Håkan Nesser have both been nominated by the Swedish Crime Writers’ Academy for the 2025 awards!
Johan Rundberg is nominated in the category of Best Swedish Debut for A Dangerous Game, and Håkan Nesser in Best Swedish Crime Novel for The Tangle of Threads — the tenth and final instalment in the beloved Barbarotti series.
‘A Dangerous Game is an absolutely brilliant thriller—realistic and almost entirely devoid of physical violence. Instead, it is ordinary human interactions that evoke a growing sense of fear: the family’s internal conflicts, the parents’ colleagues and friends, the teenagers’ increasingly unfamiliar companions. In the end, even those closest to you become potential threats.’ – Lotta Olsson
‘At 75, Håkan Nesser delivers a suspenseful and thoroughly entertaining finale to the series about the lovestruck, ever-bickering police duo. He has assembled a rich and colorful cast of characters, with family ties appearing in every direction—and, in addition, two unnamed boys with shortened little fingers. Could they be connected to the mystery, and if so, how?‘ – Kalmar Läns Tidning
The prizes, known as Den gyllene kofoten (The Golden Crowbar), will be announced on 30 November.
Warm congratulations to both authors!
Patrik Svensson’s The Merciful Killer and Fredrik Sjöberg’s Bruno Liljefors are nominated for this year’s August Prize in the Non-Fiction category. This is Patrik’s second nomination for the August Prize, which he won in 2019 for Gospel of Eels. We are so excited that Patrik and Fredrik are getting the recognition they deserve for these absolutely brilliant books.
From the Jury’s motivation:
For The Merciful Killer:With sharp compassion and deep historical insight, Patrik Svensson weaves together the fate of a family with the history of Sweden’s farm laborers. It is a family tragedy, told in a poetic yet unsparing way. Here, political and psychological forces erupt, creating an unforgettable portrayal of the Sweden that so many, for so long, have wished to forget.
For Bruno Liljefors:The Great bustard, one of the most charismatic species in the bird world, sets a dignified tone as Fredrik Sjöberg begins his biography of Bruno Liljefors. Here, two devoted observers of nature meet: the portraying author and the portrayed artist. Both possess a sharp eye for detail and for hidden connections. With magnificent eloquence, Sjöberg captures both aesthetics and ethics. The book is a work of art in itself, filled with knowledge, humor, and love.
The Crime Debut of the Year is awarded to a new star on the crime fiction scene. In addition to the story’s captivating power, the jury evaluates how well the author has managed to find an audience, and welcomes books that contribute something new to the suspense genre. The author’s book must have been published during the year since the previous Crimetime. The winner is chosen by a jury, with readers’ votes weighing just as heavily as a jury member’s.
Jury’s Motivation:
“For a cinematic and linguistically accomplished debut that is truly original. The plot is brutal and violent, yet at the same time beautiful, infused with deep empathy and melancholy. A dizzying descent into darkness, set against the backdrop of the Norrbotten forest. We are profoundly moved by the sorrowful bus driver with the shrinking heart, and the little boy who comes too close to the darkness. A short yet rich and magnificent novel that lingers long after reading.”
The Lifetime Achievement Award is presented to an author who has been groundbreaking for Swedish crime fiction and put Sweden on the crime literature map. The prize will be awarded on Saturday, September 27 at 4:00 p.m. at the Gothenburg Book Fair. Previous recipients include Maj Sjöwall, Kerstin Ekman, Håkan Nesser, Åsa Larsson, and Jan Mårtenson.
From the jury’s citation:
A powerful stylist and one of the foremost in the genre, where melancholy always walks hand in hand with humor. With his well-crafted crime novels, he helped raise the status of the genre, bringing crime fiction into the literary salon, not least onto the culture pages of the daily press. He was also one of those who paved the way for the Nordic Noir phenomenon.
Bonnier Rights are proud to announce that author Joanna Rubin Dranger has won the Nordic Council Literature Prize 2023 for her documentary graphic novel REMEMBER US TO LIFE!
This is the first time a graphic novel has won the prestigious Nordic award, and the jury’s motivation goes as follows:
Just as Joanna Rubin Dranger entered adulthood, her beloved Aunt Susanne took her own life. In “Ihågkom oss till liv”, the genre-transcending work that has been awarded the 2023 Nordic Council Literature Prize, Joanna portrays in both text and image how, many years later, she began to discover what led to her aunt’s suicide. As a result of her investigations, she is able to penetrate and explain the silences and circumlocutions that she grew up with, where relatives were “missing” or not mentioned at all. Joanna’s research leads her to the persecution of Jews in Germany, Poland, Lithuania, and Russia up to and during the Second World War, as well as the anti-Semitism and associated fallout in the Scandinavian countries and the devastating consequences of their unwillingness to help. It also leads to the joy of meeting relatives who survived by escaping to the US and Israel.
This combined research and book project has resulted in a beautiful work, which calls itself a documentary novel on the cover but is so much more: graphic novel, historical story, writer’s diary of sorts, and autobiography, where the narrator’s personal life is interwoven with major political happenings. Photography, drawing, watercolour, and text are bound up together here in an almost devastatingly effective story which, in its unique form, continues in a tradition that includes classics such as Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” and Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis”. Joanna is often drawn straight to the darkness, both the darkness of history and the darkness she soon discovers within herself, and to how this trauma continues to affect one generation after another.
Ultimately, the book heeds the words of Jewish prayer to remember the dead back to life. When Joanna discovers that a little boy in the family was murdered and no one even remembers his name, she takes the reader on a desperate search for answers. Suddenly it means everything to find out what his name was, and when she finally does, she and the reader both realise just how important memory and the representation of the lost are – to reach back through the decades and set the story straight. In this work, writing and picturing the stories of the lost becomes an act of resistance bordering on magical thinking: these people and the lives they lived were wiped out by the Nazis, and Joanna is rescuing them from oblivion. By recording the names of the murdered and carefully reconstructing their photographs and portraits, the dead are reincarnated. Although history cannot be changed, the dead come to life when we remember them.
Read more at the Nordic Council website here.
Joanna Rubin Dranger is this year’s recipient of Svenska Tecknare’s award Prisa!
The jury’s motivation goes as follows:
A picture is worth a thousand words. But how we learned to interpret the image is not always questioned and when an image gets stuck in a mold it cements stereotypes in our society.
In her work to raise awareness about the power of images, this year’s recipient has dedicated her career to, among other things, create tools to spread visual literacy and educate and inspire image creators. She is a skilled illustrator with a wide range of expressions spanning from childrens books to graphic novels, book covers and satirical drawings. Her books have been translated into many languages as well as motion pictures. Her publishing is varied and spans over thirty years. Through her masterpiece REMEMBER US TO LIFE, Joanna establishes the documentary graphic novel in Sweden, and with it she stretches the limits of what an illustrated book can be.
As an activist, pioneer and leader in her field, she has paved the way for others to follow in her footsteps. She has fearlessly tackled difficult subjects, sharing personal stories and in hers
graphic novels vulnerably depicted qualities that we all share but don’t always dare to show.
Svenska Tecknare are proud to award Prisa! 2023 to Joanna Rubin Dranger.”
The prestigious award is yearly handed out to one illustrator or artist for having had an important impact on the creative field for a significant time period.
Bonnier Rights is pleased to announce that Arabic world rights to Joanna Rubin Dranger’s documentary graphic novel REMEMBER US TO LIFE (Albert Bonniers Förlag) have been acquired by the Egyptian publisher Mahrousa.
Rights have also been acquired by Spartacus in Norway and by Planeta Comícs in Spain.
REMEMBER US TO LIFE is a documentary graphic novel and a poignant portrayal of the author’s research into her family history to make out what happened to the relatives who disappeared during the Second World War. In her attempts to depict and bring to life those who no longer exist, Joanna Rubin Dranger takes us on a journey across a century and three continents. She tells her family history, as well as our common European history and its darkest chapters that we must never forget.
REMEMBER US TO LIFE was published in Swedish in the spring of 2022 and has been unanimously praised by readers and critics. Joanna Rubin Dranger has also been nominated for the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize 2023 and won the Adamson statuette awarded by the Swedish Series Academy.
The Arabic translation will be available later in 2023. Joanna Rubin Dranger’s authorship has previously been translated into 7 languages.
