Harry Martinson was a Swedish writer, poet and former sailor. In 1949 he was elected into the Swedish Academy. He was awarded a joint Nobel Prize in Literature in 1974 together with fellow Swede Eyvind Johnson "for writings that catch the dewdrop and reflect the cosmos". The choice was controversial, as both Martinson and Johnson were members of the academy.
Karin Maria Boye was a Swedish poet and novelist. In Sweden, she is acclaimed as a poet, but internationally, she is best known for the dystopian science fiction novel Kallocain (1940).
Muriel Rukeyser was an American poet, essayist, biographer, novelist, screenwriter and political activist. She wrote across genres and forms, addressing issues related to racial, gender and class justice, war and war crimes, Jewish culture and diaspora, American history, politics, and culture. Kenneth Rexroth said that she was the greatest poet of her "exact generation," Anne Sexton famously described her as "mother of us all", while Adrienne Rich wrote that she was “our twentieth-century Coleridge; our Neruda."
Bengt Gunnar Ekelöf was a Swedish poet and writer. He was a member of the Swedish Academy from 1958 and was awarded an honorary doctorate in philosophy by Uppsala University in 1958. He won a number of prizes for his poetry.
Alma Katarina Frostenson Arnault is a Swedish poet and writer. She was a member of the Swedish Academy from 1992 to 2019. In 2003, Frostenson was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in France in recognition of her services to literature.
Swedish literature is the literature written in the Swedish language or by writers from Sweden.
Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf was a Swedish writer. She published her first novel, Gösta Berling's Saga, at the age of 33. She was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, which she was awarded in 1909. In 1914, she was the first woman to be granted a membership of the Swedish Academy.
Jonas Hassen Khemiri is a Swedish writer. He is the author of six novels, seven plays, and a collection of essays, short stories and plays. His work has been translated into more than 25 languages. He has received the August Prize for fiction and a Village Voice Obie Award for best script. In 2017 he became the first Swedish writer to have a short story published in the New Yorker. Khemiri's novel The Family Clause (FSG) was awarded the French Prix Médicis and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Khemiri moved to New York in 2021 for a Cullman Fellowship at The New York Public Library and currently teaches in the Creative Writing program at NYU. In 2023 he was a Ben Belitt Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bennington College.
Aris Fioretos is a Swedish writer, translator and scholar of Greek and Austrian extraction who writes in Swedish, German and English. Aside from his own literary career, he is also Professor of Aesthetics at Södertörn University and a member of both the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung and the Akademie der Künste.
Helene Schmitz is a Swedish photographer born 1960. In her work, Helene Schmitz is interested in how nature is described in science, art and literature. Schmitz investigates how these activities filters our understanding and her work often makes us question our preconceptions of nature. After graduating with a BA in History of Art and Cinema, she started working with photography. Today, Schmitz regularly holds exhibitions in Scandinavia and in France and her pictures have been published world-wide in National Geographic.
Ulf Lennart Nilsson was a Swedish writer who published more than 100 books and picture books, geared mainly to children and adolescents. He was also the longtime president of the Swedish Academy for Children's Books. A number of his works have been translated into English by Gecko Press.
David Lagercrantz is a Swedish journalist and bestselling writer known as the author of I am Zlatan Ibrahimovic and The Girl in the Spider's Web, the fourth installment in the Millennium series. He is also a columnist for Swedish Newspaper Expressen.
Frida Nilsson is a Swedish children’s writer whose first book was published in 2004. She has won numerous international shortlistings and prizes, including the August Prize, the German Youth Literature Prize, Expressens Heffaklump (2015) and the Astrid Lindgren Prize. She was recently chosen as one of the best emerging writers in Europe under 39. Nilsson’s writing is characterised by playfulness and sincerity. She has been compared to Roald Dahl and Barbro Lindgren.
Per I. Gedin is a Swedish publisher and writer.
Monika Ulrika Ann-Helén Laestadius is a Swedish Sámi journalist and bestselling writer. In 2016, her novel Tio över ett won the Swedish August Prize as the best submission in the children and young adult category. She wrote her first adult novel in 2021 titled Stolen, translated to English in 2023 by Rachel Willson-Broyles and became a number 1 paperback bestseller. Netflix released a film adaptation, Stolen, in 2024.
Ida Börjel is a Swedish poet.
Linnea Axelsson is a Sami-Swedish art scholar, novelist and poet.
Elin Anna Labba is a Sámi author and journalist. She has won multiple prizes for her first book Herrarna satte oss hit: om tvångsförflyttningarna i Sverige, which describes the forced migration of the Sámi from Norway to Sweden from 1919 to 1920.
Elin Cullhed is a Swedish writer, teacher and cultural journalist who won the August Prize for best fiction in 2021 for her book Eufori (Euphoria).
Nina Margita van den Brink is a Finnish-Swedish author and journalist. She won the August Prize in 2022.
