Unfortunately, we don’t have any numbers for total cultural exports in Sweden, so it’s difficult to say, but music is probably the widest-spread art form. First Aid Kit received the Swedish government’s Music Export Prize for 2023.
As for literature, it’s probably the Millennium books by Stieg Larsson, and their sequels written by other authors, such as David Lagercrantz and now Karin Smirnoff. In terms of sales and international visibility, these titles paved the way for international publishers to include Swedish authors in their lists.
Describe the structure of your organization and its goal(s). How many staff members does it employ and what are their main activities?
The Swedish Literature Exchange office is part of the Swedish Arts Council, a government agency with the task of implementing the government’s cultural policy. It funds all art forms except film. The remit of the Swedish Literature Exchange office is to promote Swedish literature and plays in translation. Our team consists of five members working on grants for translation and production, for promotion, for translator workshops, travel, and sample translations—and for all kinds of projects that are relevant to our task. Of course, we also attend international book fairs, keep the public informed about Swedish literature, and work on translator development, fellowships, and all those tools that most of our sister organizations use.
How much funding does your organization disburse in a year, and where does the funding come from?
In 2022 we approved a total sum of 11 milllion Swedish krona (approximately 977,000 Euros) across all our four grants. The funding comes from the Ministry for Culture, specifically from the budget for literature and reading.
Including the one awarded in 2021, as many as five Nobel Prizes in Literature have been awarded to writers working in English in the past decade alone. Translation into English has also been a crucial factor for many of the winners to receive consideration in the first place. In light of this linguistic hegemony, I imagine that there is an increased focus on translation into English, the costs of which can’t be met by market demand alone. Given your own institution’s limited resources, what criteria do you use to choose which authors to fund, and, given the sources of your funding, are there certain considerations factored into your selection?
Yes, English is the major door opener for most countries in terms of potential translations to be published. Only a few can read Swedish, but most editors can read English. However, as a government agency with the overall goal of making a wide variety of expressions of arts and culture of high quality available for as diverse an audience as possible, we have to consider all aspects of each application. The literary quality of the book, that the book is well written, is the most important criteria, but the chosen translator’s Swedish skills are equally important. We only fund translations directly from Swedish, with a few exceptions for languages that have no qualified translators from Swedish. The application itself is also important; we consider how the publisher will promote the book and their track record. We might give priority to genres more in need, such as poetry, or to books by contemporary authors, or to languages where Swedish literature is not that well represented. Every application round is unique.
A literary ecosystem includes not only writers and translators but also editors, reviewers, publishers, literary agents, and booksellers, all of whom play a role in fostering a vibrant literary scene. Bearing this in mind, how would you describe the state of the literary ecosystem in your country (e.g., is it healthy, in your opinion)? Does any part of your funding go toward supporting the wider literary infrastructure (as opposed to just writers and translators)? If there was a local equivalent of a magazine with a global focus like Asymptote, would it receive any ongoing support from your organization, for example?
As a representative of a government agency, it’s not up to me to have opinions, but in Sweden we have all those things, even though the market is somewhat heavy on the big players. As in many other countries, conglomerates dominate the market, owning all the parts of the chain, from booksellers, internet stores, streaming services, publishers, etc., which makes it difficult for midsize and smaller publishers and bookstores to work with less commercially successful titles. The Swedish Arts Council funds Swedish publishers and cultural magazines in order to even out this imbalance and to make it possible for a more varied supply of genres and literary voices to reach their audience. So yes, we do fund a variety of literary magazines, online and in print.
The sitcom Seinfeld was notably a flop in Germany. Similarly, authors who encounter success in one culture sometimes do not receive the same reception in another. What are some surprising crossover successes or failures you have encountered in your tenure with this institution and what do you think might have led to these outcomes?
Yes, it is well known that what constitutes a success in Sweden does not automatically translate into success in another country and vice versa. Off the top of my head, the author Björn Larsson, whose novel Long John Silver (Harvill, 1999) was well received internationally, is a very good example of this. He is not very famous in Sweden but happens to be a superstar in Italy. He even had his own book festival there some years ago. Maybe his Italian publisher did such a good job with marketing, or his books struck some special nerve in Italian readers, or a combination of both.
What are some recent challenges you have faced advocating for your country’s literature, and how has your institution adapted to meet these challenges?
I cannot think of any challenges in particular. Well, maybe that in many countries, Sweden is seen only as the country of crime writing. We indeed have a great number of skilled crime writers, and they deserve all the credit they get. However, we have so much more to offer. We would like the world to know that Sweden is a diverse literary country; we have fantastic poets such as Athena Farrokhzad and Ida Börjel, fabulous children’s and young adult authors such as Jenny Jägerfeld and Jakob Wegelius, amazing comic and graphic novel artists such as Liv Strömquist and Daria Bogdanska—and a great variety of extraordinary fiction and nonfiction authors such as Sara Stridsberg, Jonas Hassen Khemiri, and Elisabeth Åsbrink! We use all the available tools in our toolbox to change this: grants, fellowships, etc., but of course we are not doing it by ourselves. Skilled and passionate agents, foreign rights people, editors, translators, cultural magazines, literary festivals, book fairs, embassies and consulates, cultural organizations—they all contribute to this mission. We try to cooperate with as many of the active parts of the value chain as possible.
Tell us about your proudest accomplishments as an institution in the past ten years. I’d be particularly interested to hear about any campaigns that your institution conceived to advocate for your country’s literature.
We work more backstage than onstage, and I am really proud of our team. Everyone is so dedicated to the task, adjusting to new needs and realities, coming up with new ideas and daring to try new ways to work, always going that extra mile to make things great. I am really happy with how we are now working on focus genres and focus areas. We have found that this approach, which we first developed a few years ago, works really well.
In his Nobel Lecture, Kazuo Ishiguro exhorted us to “widen our common literary world to include many more voices from beyond our comfort zones of the elite first-world cultures. We must search more energetically to discover the gems from what remain today unknown literary cultures, whether the writers live in far away countries or within our own communities.” Yet, in one crucial respect, this ideal of an inclusive world literature shares the same problem as the climate crisis or even the COVID-19 vaccine crisis: countries that have the means to do something about a global situation often end up looking out for their own interests. How do you think institutional advocates of a country’s literature might be better allies for world literature, if they might even play a role at all?
In order to save ourselves and the world, we need to understand each other, to widen our own horizons, to become world citizens in a proper sense. Therefore, we all need to work to contribute to the global literary conversation by enhancing exchange of ideas, stories, images, knowledge. We all need to work for cultural exchange, and in particular for the circulation of literature throughout the world. I think the ways we work together in different networks are good examples of this: creating programs together, engaging in exchange projects, bi- or multilateral, and sending authors, editors, agents, translators to one another’s countries, is the way to go. We all gain from exchange with other countries. Here, we are a part of the NordLit network, which consists of the Nordic literature promotion offices. In Europe we have the ENLIT (European Network for Literary Translation). The members of the networks meet several times a year, working in groups on common issues, sharing best practices and collaborating in projects, book fairs, and exchange projects. So my short answer to this question is: Collaboration is key!
