Working-class fiction is generally seen as a backbone of Swedish publishing. In the meantime, we can turn our attention to a few already conspicuous tendencies. It seems likely that authors will be taking a fresh look at topics such as intimacy, distance, contagion and human contact. What the lasting effects of the Covid-19 pandemic will be on literature remain to be seen. Cancer, dementia, post-partum depression – and of course, raging fever, as in Ia Genberg’s exquisite Detaljerna (The Details Weyler, 2022). There is a lot of illness going around in fiction right now. Skugge’s review is certainly idiosyncratic, perhaps even vicious, but she has a point. ‘So you wrote about cancer that doesn’t make it art.’ So went the headline of one of the most widely discussed Swedish book reviews of recent years, a piece by critic Linda Skugge about Kristina Sandberg’s novel En ensam plats (A Lonely Place, Norstedts, 2021).
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