Nominated Swedish Titles Portray Swedish Gang Criminality
Fourteen Nordic picture books, children’s books and youth novels have been nominated for the 2024 Nordic Council Children and Young People’s Literature Prize.
Excerpt from norden.org:
This year’s nominees span the entire Nordic Region with works from all countries and language areas. The books deal with life difficulties that children and young people are confronted with in the form of absent parents, bullying and loneliness, as well as bigger social problems such as violence, war, and fleeing difficult situations.
Nominated Swedish titles
Någons bror by Viveka Sjögren
Någons bror/Someone’s brother, the book is not translated into English.
Picture book, Vombat förlag, 2023.
“And the balconies are never as cold as when the blue light is on
And mothers are never so sad as when they stand there freezing
When someone has shot someone’s brother
When someone’s brother is no longer allowed to grow up.”
Many are children and young people who, in one way or another, are affected by the ruthlessness of gang violence.
It takes courage to produce a picture book for children about a subject with so many lows, so much violence, and so much sorrow as caused by the gang shootings of our time. Yet Viveka Sjögren has this courage in spades. Sjögren also demonstrates finesse and a steady pen, which are needed in addition to courage. With poetic language, Sjögren takes the reader by the hand and walks together with them through tears, fears, but also the actions that have become like rituals. To gather in the square, to draw a drawing, and to lay down a crocheted ribbon.
Bror by Alex Khourie
Bror/Brother, the book is not translated into English.
Youth novel, Rabén & Sjögren, 2023. Cover: Jonas Lindén.
Bror transports us straight into one of the most pressing problems in Swedish society - gang crime with its brutal violence and shootings, which are increasingly penetrating further down the generations.
As readers, we get a strong sense of authenticity, that this world is depicted from within. A number of qualities contribute to that feeling – the author’s way of capturing life in the Stockholm suburb of Alby in sharp detail with everything from the different cultures and religions to food habits. The language, with its keen ear for the suburb’s sociolect and the use of Arabic words, provides an initiated description of the inner life of gangs and their hierarchies and conflicts. Many of the groups mentioned exist in real life.
The works have been nominated by the national members of the adjudication committee for the Nordic Council Children and Young People’s Literature Prize.
The Nordic Council Children and Young People’s Literature Prize was first awarded in 2013. The prize was born out of the long-standing desire of the Nordic ministers for culture to strengthen and highlight literature for children and young people in the Nordic Region.
The winner of the 2024 Nordic Council Children and Young People’s Literature Prize will be announced during a television broadcast on 22 October, which can be watched in all the Nordic countries.