“In the short story collection Renheten (‘Purity’, not translated into English), he continues to show how certain human destinies inevitably err towards misfortune. The texts take the reader through cities and suburbs, apartments and streets. In “Performances”, we meet a war correspondent who, instead of documenting the depradations of the military, gets hung up on the idea of taking their own life and how privileged that act really is. In a flash, the reader finds themselves face to face with a skinhead on a bus, a thief caught red-handed, and someone who kills his childhood friend with a hammer after humiliating him for what seems an eternity.
Andrzej Tichý’s PURITY (Renheten, Albert Bonniers förlag) is nominated to the Nordic Council Literature Prize 2021. This is the third time for Tichý to be nominated, after having been nominated previously for Fält (2008) and Kairos (2013).
The prize is awarded to a work of a ”high literary and artistic quality”, written in one of the Nordic languages. The nomination reads:
“This is talent on a par with the likes of author Lars Norén, with a dark light reminiscent of Birgitta Trotzig’s ethical demands. With his clarity of experiential experience, linguistic presence, psychological introspection, and uncompromising integrity, Tichý’s work is among the sharpest literature of our time.”
To read the full nomination, please see below:
Renheten is the collective echo of human voices whose lives and deaths challenge purity as a concept. This almost wearying address leaves the reader with a number of questions: Who is forced to clean and look after the dirt? Who can buy their way out of getting their hands dirty? Who is thought of as speaking purely?
Tichý is as much a master of depicting the misery of humanity as he is of depicting its presence. His dissatisfaction with dwelling in the dirt of realism is both interesting and impressive. By weaving social realism with suggestive currents of consciousness, Tichý instead elevates reality. Language and psyche merge. He skilfully manages to glide between different states of consciousness and both destabilises and exalts what is real or going on inside someone’s mind.
This is talent on a par with the likes of author Lars Norén, with a dark light reminiscent of Birgitta Trotzig’s ethical demands. With his clarity of experiential experience, linguistic presence, psychological introspection, and uncompromising integrity, Tichý’s work is among the sharpest literature of our time.”
Bonnier Rights are thrilled to let you know that Donia Saleh is nominated with her YA LEILA to Sweden’s most two prestigious award for debuts, Borås Debutantpris and Katapultpriset.
YA LEILA is a lyrical wonder which captures the zeitgeist, and if you haven’t read it yet, you should. Donia is definitely someone to watch 
Interested in receiving material? Talk to our agent Madelene Andersson!
Perhaps the most commonly asked question in our profession: how do we pick our new clients? On what grounds do we choose the projects we represent?
Well, as with any complex question there are several answers, but some overarching traits can be found in most of our projects and authorships. In this case I am talking about fiction and narrative nonfiction, as the process looks a little different for our children’s and illustrated non-fiction teams.
International appeal
Since the bulk of what we do is represent our authors in the arena of translation rights, at least one aspect of the manuscript must appeal to the foreign editors. It can be the topic or issue, the genre—be it crime, literary fiction with a certain Swedish angle, non-fiction with a cutting-edge international topic—or the execution or writing style. A book can be as likely to work abroad because it is ‘super Swedish’ (the exotism of Scandinavian titles is an evergreen!) as if it is written in a more broadly universal manner. What is a given is that it needs something that makes it stand out, and that something is whatever we think foreign editors will be looking to add to their lists. Remember, the editors we pitch to have their pick of manuscripts and projects from every corner of the world, so the projects we submit to them must stand out in the crowd.
Quality
There’s a publisher for every genre and editors in other countries tend to know exactly what they are looking for, be it commercial women’s fiction (often called feelgood in Sweden), crime, suspense, upmarket fiction, narrative non-fiction or a gripping memoir. A book doesn’t have to be considered of ”high quality” (whatever that is!) to make it internationally, it just has to be great within its genre. And believe us when we say that there are a multitude of genres out there in other countries that we don’t even have in Scandinavia! The difference between a crime novel, suspense, domestic thriller or procedural for example is vast. Who even knew, right?
Passion and personal taste
Never underestimate a passionate ambassador! Sometimes our agents fall in love with a project that on the surface doesn’t seem like the obvious choice for representation, but personal tastes should be taken into account too. When we read something we just love, even if the rest of the team doesn’t share that feeling, we often take it on to at least give it a try abroad or for film and TV. The sheer passion of a highly enthusiastic agent talking about a project can sometimes get editors to pick it up because they too feel the project has something a little extra. In the fiction team we say we are allowed one pure passion project a year, it’s good for everybody to work on something we love for the sake of it sometimes and where the result of the submission matters less. Otherwise we are very good at reading with our ‘work glasses’ on, so that a book that isn’t to our own personal taste might still be our biggest title of the year, as we know exactly how to pitch it and get the best deals.
The dark horse or Thinking ahead
One of our most important tasks as agents is to know our international markets. We need to know what the individual editors at the different publishers in any given country will be looking to add to their lists in the coming seasons, so that we can be on the lookout for that kind of book when we read Swedish manuscripts. This sometimes means that we need to foresee what editors are likely to be interested in in more than a year’s time or even a couple of years, to look into the crystal ball of publishing and pick a book that will be right at the right time. It can sometimes seem odd to our colleagues in editorial or marketing in Sweden when we decide to put all our efforts into one particular book or author when that book is not necessarily a lead title in the home market. That happens when we have a feeling that that particular manuscript picks up on something (a theme, style, genre or issue) that might be bigger or more popular in other countries that in Sweden, or will be by the time we get to presenting the book. A few years ago that was true of the psychological suspense genre (huge in the US and the UK especially) and lately it’s been often true of certain types of narrative non-fiction where other countries have a longer tradition of that genre than Sweden. Patrik Svensson’s The Gospel of Eels is the perfect example of that, a book I just knew would be huge abroad way before it was even fully written. When we decided to pull out all the stops for that projects and commission a full translation into English to help us sell the book, we were still almost a year away from our international submission and even months away from the author actually having finished writing the book. That’s a perfect example of when we needed to use all our skills in foreseeing that the editors would respond well to our submission a year in advance. I love when our predictions turn out to be true!
Experience and skill
I’ve been an agent for almost 15 years and worked in publishing for even longer. Me and the rest of the team have decades of combined experience. What I’ve noticed is that as we continue to work in this industry, our intuition for what will work and not, for when and how something should be pitched, or what project to highlight over another, just increases. All that experience, all those manuscripts, the hundreds, perhaps thousands of deals and negotiations, they all add up to a pretty reliable gut feeling. Sometimes we can’t even quite put words on why we believe in a certain project, or perhaps believe in something a little less—that’s when I think our intuition is at work, the sum of all that experience. So yeah, trusting our gut feeling is something we do almost daily!
Timing
Though it’s last, it is definitely not least. Timing can be everything: never mind how amazing a book is, if it’s submitted internationally at the wrong time or in the wrong season it might not at all catch the eye of the editors. This is also true for certain genres: they might be doing really well in the Swedish market, but the interest abroad might not be there at all, or not at that particular time at least. Fashions and interests change, in publishing as in everything, and it is our job to know what will or won’t work in other countries. All we can do is plan meticulously ahead as much as we can and hope our plans all fall into place. This is why we always need our authors to deliver their manuscripts on time and be sure to write the other material we need by the deadline we’ve agreed. But we wouldn’t expect anything less than timely delivery from our stellar authors, of course! 😊
After having said all this, what kind of manuscripts are we looking for then? For the fiction and narrative non-fiction part of our list we are looking for exciting, opinionated and interesting manuscripts in most genres (especially crime, suspense, literary or upmarket fiction and for me personally, genre-bending fiction) written in any of the Nordic languages.
If you have a manuscript you may already have signed with a publisher in your home market, or where you are just considering your options, drop us a line with a short presentation and the manuscript attached, and we will get back to you. It may take a few months, but we do read and respond to all submissions that come to us fitting that criteria. Our authors do not have to be affiliated with Bonnier in any way.
Our colleagues in children’s and illustrated non-fiction currently do not consider authors outside of the Swedish Bonnier Publishing Group.
Thank you for reading this far, and happy writing!
Elisabet
Literary agent, fiction and non-fiction
The August Prize, Sweden’s most prestigious literary award, goes to Lydia Sandgren for her novel COLLECTED WORKS in the category best fiction 2020! We are absolutely thrilled and send our warmest congratulations to Lydia.
Read more about the prize and the jury’s motivation here: https://www.augustpriset.se/bidrag/samlade-verk
Late October. So here we are once again after a busy Gothenburg and Frankfurt Fair. Rapid 30-minute meetings with editors who looked slightly more ragged by the day, fizzy cava at 02.00 at ‘The Hof’, a hasty ink-blotted offer on a a5 college pad page dropped on your desk in the middle of a pitch to someone else, lukewarm coffee and tired feet. Or wait, what actually happened this year?
Well, it is safe to say that this year wasn’t really like previous fair seasons, for better and for worse. Instead we found ourselves in the middle of a historic moment: the digital Frankfurt Fair. The fair that has roots in the 15th century (before the printing press, no less) was this year rebranded to “FakeFurt 2020” by the industry’s nerdy wordsmiths. If you were wondering, they are quite abundant.
Unlike the chaotic situation in March, we had now all had time to learn how to use the funny backgrounds in Microsoft Teams, discover the quirkiness in that Google Meet works best in any other browser than Google Chrome, have the compulsory ethics discussion about Zoom, and were now experts. Instead of crammed, shiny white tables as far as the eye can see, we were invited into editors’ homes, offices and lives.
And what did we find out in our meetings? That this industry had it rough in March and April yes, but also that it is resilient, strong, optimistic, flexible and extremely kind-hearted. Whether it was the campaigns in France and Spain to save independent book shops, pushing publishing dates to 2021 to give debuts a fair shot at finding their audience, putting together a zoomlive interview in Israel in the middle of the second-wave lockdown, asking for an especially created uplifting letter from the author to readers in Taiwan or the happy response from an editor who despite just losing an auction that she’s glad that the book found a home in her language, this industry is doing everything it can to make sure it survives.
After so many years of everyone talking about the “death of the book”, I think it might leave us shocked and deeply humbled to see that in fact, despite the worst pandemic in a century, state-wide lockdowns and an economic backlash, the book is stronger than ever. Many European editors told us that after the tough struggle in March through May, they saw record sales in June, July and August. With less actual travelling allowed, it seems that we, the readers, are all once again longing to travel within the confines of a hardback: regardless whether it’s to imaginary fantasy lands, into the depths of the mind of someone different than ourselves or a journey of self-discovery, the book is here to stay.
’Sweden’s King of Crime’ Håkan Nesser wins the Honorary Award at Crimetime, Gothenburg Book Fair 2020.
’Sweden’s King of Crime’ Håkan Nesser wins the Honorary Award at Crimetime, Gothenburg Book Fair 2020.Håkan Nesser is awarded the Crimetime Award in the category Honorary Award of the Year 2020. The award will be presented during Crimetime Gothenburg at the Book Fair Play on 26 September. The honorary prize is awarded to an author who has been a pioneer in Swedish crime literature and put Sweden on the map for crime storytelling.
Part of the jury’s motivation reads:
Multi-award-winning, over 20 million books sold worldwide, and an impressive collection of high-quality literary crime novels, where several have been made into film or tv-series. He’s mesmerised critics as well as readers for over 30 years with his absolutely unique tone and inventive style… This year the annual Honorary Award goes to Sweden’s King of Crime: Håkan Nesser.
Read the book fair’s press release here: https://bokmassan.se/…/hakan-nesser-tilldelas…/
So, it’s September and we have a very special autumn ahead of us. My colleagues and I are now all back from our holidays and though we still only work occasionally from our regular Stockholm office, we’re up to speed!
Day by day, we are getting more excited about the books that Bonnierförlagen are publishing this year and that we have the pleasure to present to publishers from all around the world. We are thrilled that so many of our friends and clients have accepted our invitation to have virtual meetings as a substitute for the bookfairs in Göteborg and Frankfurt. It is going to be a challenge to do business this new way but we’ll manage and I’m sure that we will learn a lot along the way.
In a couple of weeks we will say goodbye to our valued colleague Cecilia, who is leaving the team to pursue new opportunities. One of the last projects Cecilia is involved in is managing the production and printing of our autumn catalogues for children’s and illustrated non-fiction books, and I can promise you that they will look as smashing as all our catalogues have ever since Cecilia started to be involved in the design and production process two years ago. Print catalogues might seem out of date, and we regularly evaluate the need for them, but I believe they will be more important this autumn than in a long time, at least when it comes to presenting illustrated books. So, if you, dear reader, are scheduled for a virtual meeting with my colleague Mathilde or me during September or October, look out for an old-fashioned and very real piece of printed matter in the mail. It is going to complement our virtual interaction in the most wonderful way.
Wishing you a fruitful month ahead!
Per, Agent for Illustrated Non-Fiction
Summer is here, the sun is mostly shining and the holidays are around the corner. We are leaving behind a hectic period which has seen us setting up our homes offices and finding new routines in our communications with colleagues and with our foreign partners. The turmoil has encouraged us to think about our job in new ways. A real crash course in digital meetings with a little extra technical challenge for us selling rights to illustrated books!
The cancellation of the Bologna Book Fair has really been the catalyst that has led us to think in a different way. Our overall feeling is that nothing can replace the face-to-face meetings and the joys of being able to present a printed copy of a brilliant new picture book or novel to our colleagues from all around the world. At fairs, we have the pleasure of welcoming several dozen foreign publishers at our stand to introduce them to our new list of titles, chat about the book industry, the trends, the markets… So much invaluable information, that allows us to be even more effective when we come back to our desks in Sweden. But the fair and the fun are not over when we leave our stands at the end of the day. No book fair in Bologna would be complete without the lively strolls in the town in the evening, the long italian pasta dinners, the exciting conversations with editors and colleagues… The magic can definitely happen in these informal settings, around a glass of chilled prosecco. A pitch, a story can strike a chord there and then and this will result in a sale. Happy moments that make all our efforts worth it!
I recently read an article on the Economist which stated “One of the great thrills of reading is encountering a situation that is familiar in feeling yet alien in context.” I could really relate to this statement, it rang true and for us selling foreign rights, it is very relevant. The emotions are universal, we as readers vibrate with characters whose emotions and internal struggles we recognize and can identify with, but each story is unique in its cultural setting, dramaturgy, set of characters… It feels like for younger readers, the exposure to other cultures is more important than ever in these unstable times. Reading can bring an understanding of what makes us so unique, but also, and that really is the power of literature, of what brings us all together. The pleasure of placing a good book abroad, finding a good publisher that will champion it is real and can be a little step towards a more inclusive society.
Let’s take this with us this summer as we enjoy our mostly Swedish holidays and can dive into the stories of our favourite authors, foreign or local, or else find the time to enjoy enchanting new voices.
Bel été à tous !
Mathilde, agent for children’s books
Four months after the dreaded c-word unfolded and we are now looking forward to enjoying a long summer break, albeit with continued social distancing. In Sweden we count ourselves very lucky to be able to take several weeks off to read for pleasure, indulge in our hobbies (mine will be learning to sail and renovating a sailboat) and gather our energies for what will be a bustling autumn, in whatever shape it will take.
My home office has come into its own with the warm weather as I’m fortunate enough to be able to inhale the fresh country air outside on the deck with my laptop, and trusty cat Pebbles reminding me when it’s time for a snack or to lay down tools for the day.
Besides working with a host of wonderful Swedish writers, another part of my role entails selling rights to our Finnish authors’ books, working with colleagues in Helsinki. This spring we’ve had fantastic success with crime writer Arttu Tuominen’s crime series; an uplifting, prize-winning debut women’s fiction by Marja Kangas; and Tiina Laitila Kälvemark’s fascinating novel about a woman with active side personalities and a penchant for free diving. On the non-fiction side, we’ve been finding solace in psychotherapist Maaret Kallio’s latest book on the power of hope.
Another professional hat of mine is selling film and tv rights for our authors. The pandemic has had a stark impact on cinemas as well as production due to travel restrictions and social distancing, but I’m happy to say that our ongoing projects haven’t been overly impacted and so we look forward to being able to share some more exciting updates on specific projects soon.
In a couple of weeks it will be time to turn my focus away from the laptop and take a break from social media to focus on my summer reading, including more essential reading on becoming a stronger ally to ending racism, and some quality time at the beach to recharge the batteries for what will be an exciting but full autumn ahead.
Thank you to all the authors, publishers, editors, translators, scouts, readers and other champions of literature who make what we do so enjoyable. Have a healthy and fun summer, and see you again in August!
This time of year is really something special. In Sweden, we call it “mellan hägg och syrén”, the magical time of early summer between the blooming of the bird-cherry and the lilacs when the trees are most lush, dreams of having a summer that will make up for 9 months of darkness are still intact, and the freedom of a long holiday is looming just behind the riverbend (unless of course, you are allergic, then it’s unfortunately mostly known as sneeze season).
In our business, it’s also a time to look forward to the autumn season, planning new submissions, editing inspiring material from the authors, mapping out the intricate schedule of available translators, and optimizing every detail that we can control. Simultaneously, we are wrapping up the spring season – filling holes in our list of submissions, discussing what lessons that we can learn from the previous season that we take with us to the next, and hopefully celebrating the success of a job well done since it’s so important to pat ourselves on the back a bit too.
Normally, this time would also mean that we have a bit of a breather, closing down the intense fair season and moving into a more regular pace – but as absolutely no one needs reminding of, this spring has not been anything close to normal. Last year, I had just arrived home from Paris where the Swedish Institute had gathered French publishers, translators, and Swedish agents for a beautiful day of speed-dating, lectures, laughs and coffee in their spectacular garden. Sitting there, we had time to talk at length about their specific tastes, their favorite novels, their dream projects, and how our titles would fit into their lists.
Those are my favorite moments in this rather strange business, that is still so dependent on face to face meetings; more than the busy, frantic fairs where everyone is trying to find the next big thing, and more than the zoom meetings and long, personal emails that we fill our time with otherwise. There is no better way to enthuse someone about a book than to show your own enthusiasm, and although it’s difficult to measure, I’m sure that the non-verbal communication that happens in those meetings is integral to our business.
As we are all slowly settling in our new ways after the first wave of initial shock, the tempo is rather going up now in June than down. Thus, we are still going full speed ahead: continuing to update, submit and remind all the wonderful international publishers about our strong spring list, with titles that deserve the attention that they normally would have gotten during fair season. Our updates are even more enthusiastic, even more strongly worded, and take double the amount of time and effort than they otherwise would have done. Emails don’t have body language, after all.
Even more so important then, that we go outside and literally smell the flowers, to clear our minds, find inspiration, and dream of better times – or even just normal times – in this most gorgeous season of the year. At least, it’s my new morning routine, and I have to say that the lilac has never smelled better.
Madelene
Junior Agent, Fiction & Narrative Non-Fiction
