News

Second season of TV-series The Trainees of Lars Lerin in the making

Today our secret is out! A second season of the successful TV-series The trainees of Lars Lerin is in the making. As you are reading this the whole group is in Brazil!

Next year, viewers get acquainted once again with Timmy, Jessica, Birgitta, Dennis and the other art students together with Lars Lerin and Manoel Marques Lerin. After the first season was broadcasted last year, Lerin and his students have kept in touch and they have seen each other once a week and painted together.

“It great friendship has developed between us and it was natural for us to continue with a second season”, says Lars Lerin.

He thinks the apprentices have developed a lot since the first season was broadcast.

– They dare more, both in the creative process and as people. They have gained more confidence and they dare to challenge themselves to do things that they previously did not think they could handle, he says.

In the new season, they travel to Brazil, among other things, to widen their artistic impressions, they are guided by Manoel “Junior” Marques in his homeland.

“It has been very fun. Junior can speak the language and take us on different assignments. We meet artists, look at different things and experience life in this part of the world. We were at Copacabana yesterday and painted, he says.

The second season of “Lerins apprentices” is premiere on SVT this spring.

Welcome to the home of Princess Olga Romanoff

The memoirs of Princess Olga Romanoff will be released in several countries during the period of 2018-2020, starting with Serbia on September 7th.

Her home, Provender House in Kent, UK, is also available for photo shoots as well as a film setting. The 13th century house, has been seen in series such as Ukrainian Bachelor, You can’t get the staff and in many documentaries.

Provender dates back to the 13th century and was named after its first owner, Sir John de Provender. Sir John had become rich in the service of King Henry III, from whom he received a pension of one penny a day – a princely sum for the times.

In the 14th century the de Viennes – wealthy local landowners – bought Provender and added a private wing, including a magnificent vaulted ‘solar’ with beautiful carved crown posts. This, recently restored under the direction of Ptolomy Dean and English heritage, is now called The Crown Post Room and together with the dining room has formed the core of the house since the 13th century.

Over the following six centuries, Provender’s architecture reflected England’s history on a human scale. Adventurers, explorers, heiresses and princesses have lived here, each re-fashioning the house or adding wings to make it their own. It was sold to James Huguesson, ‘merchant adventurer’, in 1633, and remained in his family for nearly three hundred years.

The development of the 18th century wing was carried out by Sir William Huguesson who died in 1779, leaving his house to his two daughters, Dorothy and Mary. Dorothy married the naturalist Joseph Banks, who planted hickory and chestnut trees and ‘Banksia’ roses at Provender. They died without heirs and the house was inherited by Mary Huguesson’s son, Edward Knatchbull-Huguesson, 9th Baronet and first Lord Brabourne.

It’s possible that Jane Austen would have visited Provender from her brother’s home nearby in Godmersham – potentially checking out Provender’s Edward Knatchbull-Huguesson as a potential husband for her favourite niece, Fanny Knight. Fanny did indeed marry Edward, and lived at Provender despite fretting that its 30 rooms would be inadequate for her seven family members and twelve servants. Her son, Lord Brabourne, edited the first edition of Jane Austen’s letters, having found them, along with an original copy of ‘Lady Susan’ in Jane’s hand-writing, ‘in a box at Provender.’

Provender is now the home of Princess Olga Romanoff, the daughter of Prince Andrew Romanoff, the eldest nephew of the Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. The Knatchbull-Huguessons rented the house to Princess Olga’s maternal great-grandmother in 1890, and sold it at auction in 1912 to her Finnish grandmother Sylvia McDougall, born Borgström in Helsinki. During the Second World War, Provender was requisitioned. It was then returned after the war to Sylvia’s daughter Nadine who in 1942 had married Prince Andrew Romanoff.

When Princess Andrew died in 2000, the house was almost derelict, but a programme of careful restoration has revealed a wealth of historical and architectural detail. This makes Provender a fascinating record of English life over seven centuries.

Open for submission: Our insane Family

Wilhelmine of Prussia

Wilhelmine of Prussia’s no-holds-barred memoirs give a penetrating insight into the bizarre upbringing she and her brother Frederick the Great suffered at the hands of an insane father and a callous mother. Almost unbelievably, the family was forced to go hungry and to dress in tatters, while their father ploughed the considerable resources of the state into creating the Prussian Militaristic Machine which would cause several European wars in the future, including the Franco-Prussian War and the First and Second World Wars.

These memoirs were translated by Queen Victoria’s daughter Helena, with the approval of her sister Crown Princess Victoria and brother-in-law Crown Prince Frederick of Germany (the parents of Kaiser Wilhelm 11) as a covert warning to Europe of the dangerous direction in which Bismarck and Emperor Wilhelm 1 were steering the German Empire.

This edition includes an illuminating and unique Foreword and updated Introduction by HRH Princess Katarina, Lady de Silva, a descendant of these historical figures, explaining the objectives of the author, Wilhemine, in penning such witheringly frank memoirs, and the translator, Helena, in translating into English for widespread dissemination a tale which was by then unknown even in Germany, and which, under more ordinary circumstances, they would have suppressed. However, these supporters of constitutional monarchy and liberal government were intent on warning the world of the dangers of absolute monarchy and unchecked militarism, and hoped that by disseminating these memoirs throughout the English-speaking world, they could bring pressure to bear upon the direction the German State was taking.

As a historical document of rare prescience, this edition, with the updated Foreword and Introduction, is unsurpassable.

The book is translated from German by Queen Victoria’s daughter, HRH Princess Helena, now edited and updated by HRH Princess Katarina, Lady de Silva.

Open for submission: One day you’ll wake up

One day you’ll wake up by award winning author Conny Palmkvist consists of 9 short stories.

In these short stories you meet people who all face life changing events. The surroundings seem to slip around them as they grow up and try to grasp the nuisance of their fate.

Conny Palmkvist chores the portrait of them and their stories with his typically sparse style. It is a journey through a rugged landscape of love, guilt, forgiveness and exclusion. In the collection is the nationally noted short story Lowland.

“Umeå Novell Prize goes to the writer Conny Palmkvist, who, with an exemplary consequence, local touches and personal language senses a group of young boys handy meeting with the adult world.”

Open for submission: The Real Diana

The Real Diana by author Lady Colin Campbell, with a new afterword is now open for submission.

Lady Colin Campbell

“When I met Diana at a mutual friend’s house in 1990, I was astonished by her conduct. Up to this point, the Diana I had encountered was a princess who had behaved very much in keeping with the forms and traditions of royalty. In social situations, she was as circumspect as the rest of them, as indeed all ladies are….

“Now, however, she was the antithesis of circumspect. Throwing caution and reserve to the wind, she said that she wanted me to write the truth about her life ‘because I feel as if the whole fairy tale is crushing whatever’s left of the real me…. If you’d just write about the real Diana, it would make all the difference.’”

–Lady Colin Campbell

Who was the real Diana? What was it like to be so privileged yet so anguished, so beloved yet so self-loathing, so spoiled yet so despairing? The Princess of Wales was all these things–far more complicated, conflicted, and intriguing a person than the wildly disparate saint or lunatic she is frequently portrayed to be.

Royal insider Lady Colin Campbell sets the record straight on many of the most controversial aspects of Diana’s turbulent life: how Charles and Diana’s engagement came to pass, though it seemed ill-advised to those closest to both of them; what their honeymoon was really like; the truth behind Diana’s bulimia, her widely reported suicide attempts, and her obsession with Camilla Parker Bowles; Diana’s search for love and fulfillment with numerous men before, during, and after her marriage; her brilliant manipulations of the press; and her relationship with Dodi Fayed.

Lady Colin Campbell’s New York Times bestselling biography Diana in Private was the first to expose the truth about Diana and her troubled marriage. In The Real Diana, she reveals that the reason she knew so much about what went on behind the palace gates was because Diana herself was the source. Drawing upon these confidences–as well as on conversations with countless people who knew Diana and with Diana herself in the final years of her life–Lady Colin Campbell combines true insight with true compassion to bring us the most intimate and revealing portrait of the Princess of Wales that we will ever have.

Selection of reviews

‘Explosive … The most sensational book of the year’ – Mail on Sunday

‘Startling new revelations from the woman who has written the headline-making
biographies about Princess Diana-astonishing’ – Hello! Magazine

‘Britain is buzzing about The Real Diana’ – Victoria Mather, The Early Show,
CBS News

‘Some Palace watchers note that she has an impressive roster of well-placed
contacts and credit her with writing the most believable Diana biography’
– People Magazine

‘Lays bare the facts about Diana’s affair with James Hewitt and the reasons for
Diana’s death in 1997’ – Evening Standard

‘Bombshell revelations by Lady Colin Campbell, the former wife of a cousin of
the Queen of England’ – Ireland on Sunday

‘A tribute to a truly remarkable and outstanding woman’ – Later Living

‘Lady Colin Campbell is a highly successful and prolific author, most famous for
her two biographies of Diana, Princess of Wales’ – Sarah Wicker, chatshow.com

‘If you are maintaining a Diana library, Lady Colin Campbell’s books are now must haves’ – Royal Book News

 

Sandgrund Lars Lerin Museum – A must see!

Lars Lerin_watercolor_artist
Sandgrund Lars Lerin

Sandgrund Lars Lerin is located in Karlstad, Sweden, and is the museum of the art of Lars Lerin, awarded with the Tourism Prize 2016.

The permanent exhibition shows different themes from Lars Lerin’s 30 years as an artist. Sandgrund contains watercolor paintings, oil paintings, graphic art, collages and photographs from many places in the world, for example Värmland County, where Lars Lerin was born and currently lives, Lofoten which was Lars’ home for several years during the 90’s and a lot of work and reports from Lars’ travels to the Arctic and Antarctica, Russia, Iceland, Scotland, The Faroe Islands, India, Egypt and Iran. Sandgrund is privileged to be able to show Lars Lerin’s dark and pale colors in his work, and how they reflect the artist’s own emotional and artistic life from the early 70’s to present.

Sandgrund Lars Lerin

Lars Lerin was born and raised in Munkfors, Värmland. He studied at the school of Gerlesborg 1974-75 and at the Department of Fine Arts, Valand 1980-84. Lars Lerin is considered to be the leading artist in watercolor technique today. He has had solo exhibitions and group exhibitions in art museums and galleries in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, France, the Faeroe Islands, Iceland, Germany, Norway and the United States. Lars Lerin’s work is exhibited in County Councils, Municipalities and museums in Sweden and Norway. Five of his paintings have been honored to be stamps in Sweden.

Lars Lerin

Lars Lerin is also a prolific author and has since his debute Utpost (1983), written and released more than fifty books. His book Naturlära was honored with the August Prize 2014, and in 2016 Lars Lerin was honored the Royal medal Litteris et Artibus for his great achievements as an artist and author by HM the king. He and the TV-series Yours truly, was honored with not one, but two, Crystal-awards 2016, and the TV-show was seen by over 1.000.000 viewers.

A selection of art by Lars Lerin

Welcome, Lady Colin Campbell

Lady Colin Campbell is a highly successful and prolific author and has been a prominent and often controversial figure in royal and social circles for many years. She perhaps is best known for her international bestselling book Diana in Private, 1992, and her subsequent extended and revelatory biography of the Princess of Wales, The Real Diana published in 2004. She has written books on the Royal Family, been a long term columnist and appeared numerous times on TV and Radio as an experienced Royal Insider and expert on the British aristocracy.

Born in Jamaica, she spent much of her early adult life in America where she became a model and studied apparel design. She is connected to British royalty through common ancestors such as the Emperor Charlemagne and William the Conqueror as well as, through her marriage, to the uncle of the Duke of Argyll, who is a cousin of the Queen. She has two sons and lives in London, in the city and at Goring Castle in Sussex.

Among her latest books are The Untold Life of Queen Elizabeth – The Queen Mother, published in 2012 and the book attracted considerable press interest. Once more Lady Colin Campbell shows that as a writer she is not only astonishingly courageous but also extremely well informed, with an impressive roster of “well placed contacts” as People magazine has credited her, and yet again she brings penetrating insight and the empathy of a truly compassionate person to her subject, bringing the Queen Mother alive in a way that no previous writer has ever succeeded in doing.

Her new book, published in June 2018, is The Queen’s Marriage, the inside story of the Queen’s marriage from contains previously undisclosed revelations. In this new book royal historian Lady Colin Campbell covers the Queen’s marriage in intimate detail. Using her connections and impeccable sources she recounts details of the inside story of the monarch’s relationship with the Duke of Edinburgh and her close family.

Carola Hansson awarded the Selma Lagerlöf Prize 2018

On August 11th, author Carola Hansson will be awarded the Selma Lagerlof Literary Award. The prize is intended as a reward for an outstanding author in Selma Lagerlöfs spirit and the prize is 100,000 SEK. The prize has previously been given to Astrid Lindgren among others.

The motivation for being awarded the prize of 2018:

“ An author that creates a world of poems where dreams become reality, where reality becomes a dream. The conditions in the world of poetry is loss; exile, it’s engine is the search for the essential that makes sense just by searching for its meaning.”

New Nordic Crime by Liam Norberg

Liam Norberg studied screenwriting, production, acting and drama in the 90’s. He played the lead role in the Swedish cult classic movie The Searchers (1993) by Daniel Fridell and Peter Cartriers. He starred in Blood Brothers (2006) by Daniel Fridell. His new movie Syndicate will be released (2018/2019).

The last years he has written several books, including Inside (2009) which won the Pocket Price Gold and Time of the Searchers (2013). Today he is engaged in various film projects and a number of screenplays, both as a developer and author. More recently also as a director in the multi award winning short movie Mia and the upcoming Cmore and TV4 series Crashing a Ferrari (2018/2019). His new Nordic Crime novel, Almost there (Nästan framme) will be released in October 2018.

The new crime novel

Joel Berger and Micke Örnskog, friends and gunmen, have committed a long range of transport value crimes over the years – and managed to escape.

Liam Norberg

They have been able to live well. Micke is a family father with a wife and son in a villa in Bromma, just outside of Stockholm. Joel lives a more free life, without any particular goal, in addition to becoming financially independent – and keeping the heart running. Joel has a heart failure that causes him to have a pacemaker  – a secret that only the closest ones know.

After a race at Solvalla’s racetrack during the Elit Race, Micke and Joel start to move in different directions. Joel wants to continue their “career” and, through a contact in the financial world, he gets tips on a “deal” that can give at least 40 million. It could be the ultimate fraud. Micke is skeptical of Joel’s high-flying plans, he also has received an insider tip, which can give them the biggest change of mug ever and … total freedom.
Nothing goes as they imagined though.

An agency with a view

The agency continues to grow and become even stronger in all parts of the world and we are happy to collaborate with two more co-agents, experienced literary agents with a wealth of knowledge of their respective territories.

In the literary world today no one is an island, they key is good cooperations with the most professional people there is, that are strong partners in their countries with great networks. It benefits the authors that are represented as well as literature in general.

Simona Kessler and her team will represent the agency in Romania and Moldova.

 

 

 

Otago Agency with foreign rights manager Vito di Battista will represent the agency in Italy.

One more book by Solja Krapu becomes audiobook

Solja Krapu-Kallio

The book Mogen för skrubben will become an audio book as well in Sweden, this is the debute novel by Solja Krapu.

It’s late Friday, teacher Eva-Lena is almost done for the week, she just needs to take a couple of copies in the emtpy school. The door to the copy space closes suddenly and she cannot open it from the inside. All alone in the building she has to spend two days by herself. A person surrendered in this way changes both bodily and spiritually.

The author and poet Solja Krapu debuts as novelist with a funny, purely ironic and well-written novel about life, love and our society today. The novel is recently published in France.

 

 

 

Until only Ashes remains by Lisa Bjurwald

The manuscript of Until only Ashes remains by award winning author Lisa Bjurwald is now available in full in Swedish and with a sample translation in English. The book is just published in Holland.

Rebecka studied the weapon for a few seconds before she discovered the engraving. 6 6 6. The number of the beast. The devil had come to Värmland County.

Stockholm, spring 2016. Rebecka Born has been given the opportunity to pursue a career as a specialist police in the section for Special Threats (SSH), an elite group fighting terrorism and organized crime.

Her first case: To investigate the mysterious murders of two women who were found truncated and burned by a river. Once in place in Värmland County, Rebecka is faced with a whole new type of threat – a threat that can not be construed with common police methods. What has happened to the young women? Has a serial killer started to expel their hunting fields?

A terrified teenage girl is kept at the hospital at Karlstad’s psychiatric clinic and dares to open herself a bit. Is she sitting on the key to the murder?

While Rebecka is searching for answers in the darkness, she is being oppressed by the local police, and her own demons begin to come alive. A traumatic event in her teens has put deep marks. Now her career is threatened as well as her mental stability.

 

 

 

The novel Sund/Bay becomes audio book as well

The novel Sund/Bay by award winning author Tove Folkesson will become an audio book as well. In 2017 she was rewarded the prestigious SVD’s Literary Prize as well as the Bonnier Scholarship Award. She is also honored with Aftonbladet Culture Prize this year.

Eva Zackrisson, a hunter from Kalmar in the South part of Sweden, is heading out into the world. After a crash landing at the Stockholm School of Architecture, she is caught in the millennium shift’s wonderful dream of self-realization. Music, theater, poetry, collective, journeys to Cuba – nothing must be left ransacked in pursuit of true nature.

But maybe it is already there, really close: the childhood’s safe landscape on the island of Öland with a grandmother who never changes and an uncle who never intends to read the Alchemist and measures humidity with a tube of sugar.

As far as peppers grows

Author and psychologist Eva Rusz lights up the room when she enters. Her platinum blonde hair and arctic blue eyes speak of her Swedish heritage, but her sun caressed skin says she’s been living a little closer to the equator than Stockholm these days. It’s difficult to ever imagine this successful, strong, confident woman feeling a moment of self doubt, but that’s exactly how she felt at the end of 2004.

In the wake of a bitter divorce, fighting to keep assets she brought to the marriage, Eva knew she had to get away for a while. Now she has a well established practice in Aruba, and is also an expert in the Swedish magazine Kurera and in the Aruban magazine Amigoe. She is also writing on her new book!

Read the article here, about how she changed her life completely.

Until only Ashes remains by Lisa Bjurwald published in Holland

Lisa Bjurwald is an award winning journalist, author, lecturer and expert on xenophobia whose reportage books about the extreme right have been translated into several languages.

Bjurwald has been working as a journalist for more than 20 years, including being an editor of major newspapers Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet, as a columnist in Expressen and Aftonbladet, editor of the Media World as well as having worked as a reporter in USA, London and Rome.

She has been nominated for the Media Medal of the Year and has won a journalist award from the European Parliament. Currently, she is editor-in-chief and responsible publisher for the magazine Author. She is nominated for the Raoul Wallenberg Prize 2018.

Her crime novel Until only ashes remains is just published in Holland.

Romanov family members pay tribute to Nicholas II on 100th anniversary of his murder

Twelve members of the Romanov House have come to St. Petersburg to pay homage to last Russian Czar Nicholas II and his family members marking 100 years since the Royal family’s execution, President of the Romanov Family Association Princess Olga Andreevna, Nicholas II’s grand-nephew, told reporters at a news conference at the TASS St. Petersburg press center.

“There are twelve of us in St. Petersburg today. First of all, we will be present in the St. Peter and Paul Fortress. After that, we will have a special dinner,” the princess said, adding that she, along with other Romanov family members, visited the State Hermitage Museum on Tuesday morning.

According to the press service of the St. Petersburg administration, a Divine Liturgy dedicated to the centenary of the Royal family’s murder was held in the Grand Church in the Winter Palace. “The Divine Service was attended by Governor Georgy Poltavchenko and representatives of the Romanov family. The service was led by Archpriest Vladimir Sorokin, Senior Priest of the St. Vladimir Cathedral,” the administration reported.

Prayer services in memory of Russia’s last Emperor Nicholas II and his family members will be held in several churches of St. Petersburg associated with the Romanov dynasty. “Night services will be held in two churches related to the Romanov House. The first church is the Feodorovsky Sovereign’s Cathedral in Tsarskoye Selo, where the Royal family members went to pray from the Alexander Palace. The second place is the Cathedral of the Icon of the Most Holy Theotokos of St. Theodore, which was a special heavenly patroness of the Romanov family and the empresses,” Natalya Rodomanova, head of the Communications Sector at the St. Petersburg Metropolitanate, informed TASS.

 Czar Nicholas II, who abdicated the throne on March 2, 1917, and his family were executed by a firing squad in the basement of the Ipatyev House in Yekaterinburg overnight to July 17, 1918. The Russian Orthodox Church canonized them in 2000 as imperial passion bearers.

Tass Agency

A Tear in the Curtain, open for submissions

The wonderful novel A tear in the Curtain by John Symons is now open for submissions.

This story of three families, Russian, Hungarian and British, is a timely reminder of the recent but half-forgotten period in which the story is set, the Cold War. Their experiences reflect the brutality, bravery, heartbreak, hope and disappointment of those days when Europe was divided by the Iron Curtain.

As a thaw in East-West relations set in following the death of Stalin, an English school teacher was able to invite a Russian boy and a Hungarian brother and sister to join him and his family for a seaside holiday. The visitors returned home just before the outbreak of the Hungarian uprising and the Suez crisis intensified the Cold War again.

Through the lives of the four children and their families, the book describes the impact of the brutal repression of the Hungarian people, during which the older boy and his mother were killed, but two younger children escaped to the West and were adopted by the British family.

As the children grew up on either side of the Iron Curtain, they were affected by world events, including the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Solidarity movement in Poland in the early 1980s, the end of Communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Through his remarkable grandmother, the only person he can trust in a society where no one knows who is an informer, the Russian boy learns the story of their people’s sufferings after Lenin seized power and established a criminal and mendacious regime in Russia that would last most of the century.

Narrated in simple, fast-moving language, describing how events impact on the children as they grow up, the book will appeal not only to adults but to young people. A fifteen year-old boy with dyslexia was absorbed by the story and read it, twice, in thirty-six hours. He said how much it helped him to see the meaning of Hitler and the Second World War which he was studying for his exams.

Princess Olga Romanoff to visit St. Petersburg

The head of the Romanov Family Association, Princess Olga Romanoff, will visit St Petersburg on the centenary anniversary since the execution of Russia’s last Czar Nicholas II and his family. Her grandmother, Grand Duchess Xenia of Russia, who fled to United Kingdom after the revolution was the sister of Czar Nicholas II.

On July 17, she will attend a memorial service in honor of the martyrs and confessors at the St Peter and Paul’s Cathedral and at the Winter Palace in St.Peterburg, Russia.

Her memoirs will be published in several countries during 2018-2020.

Andrey by Carola Hansson released in China

The novel Andrey by author Carola Hansson is released in China. The book is previously released in Sweden, Finland, Russia and Lithuania.

Lev Tolstoy (1828-1910) was not only a great author – he was also something of an empire. He lived in a time of immense social contradictions, wrote and commented on everything – from morality and religion to politics and social issues – and his influence was so great that one could argue that Russia had three power centers during his lifetime: the Tsar, the Church and Tolstoy himself.

When, for various reasons, Carola Hansson began to immerse herself in his work and in the documentary material surrounding his person (letters, diaries, eyewitness sources and biographies of all kinds), she was not only struck by the contradiction of his person and of the deepness he was disturbed by in the conflict between ideal and reality, between the ascetic Christian socialism he preached and the life he lived as an estate and landowner – but also to the extent to which Tolstoj’s family seemed to live in a strange borderland between life and poems. Tolstoy was not just a writer who gained inspiration from life around him; He also seems to have ruled and shaped his life with the written word – in the most prophetic way. The fact that the author chose to write about his son Andrej was due, among other things, to him being the black sheep of the family; the strongest and perhaps most self-destructive sought to oppose the father’s power and ideas. Unlike the other family, he did not write diary.

The novel begins in 1904. On a train heading east through Russia against Manchurite. Andrej is voluntarily on his way out in the Russian-Japanese war. He feels compelled to fulfill the threatening prophecy about his future as the father has written in the drama `The Living Body ‘- a sedictory story that ends with his alter ego, the immoral Fedja, fulfilling the duty to take his life. The journey through the vast landscape wakes Andrejs’s memories to life. Memories of childhood, of the ever-endangered upper class life in Moscow and on the estate Jasnaya Polyana and, not least, of his conflicted relationship with the father.

The novel Andrey was nominated for the August Prize and was awarded the Lundequistska Bookstore Literature Prize, the Torgny Segerstedt Prize, the Swedish Radio’s Great Novel Prize and a later Swedish Academy’s Signe Ekbladh-Eldh’s Prize.

 

Summer exhibition at Sandgrund Lars Lerin Museum by the Trainees of Lars Lerin

In May and until September the trainees of Lars Lerin, from the TV-series, will show their art at Sandgrund Lars Lerin Museum.

The exhibition is called “From the animals in Africa to the cat on the table”.

In the TV-series, were there was an exhibition as well with other art of the Trainees of Lars Lerin, HM Queen Silvia opened the exhibition at the museum.

Welcome Conny Palmkvist

Welcome to the agency, author Conny Palmkvist!

“What is common for all his stories, and the reason for reading Winter, is Conny Palmkvist’s amazing language. He writes a language that is absolutely wonderful, and is crystal clear, enlightened and without a word too much. It’s poetic lust, a kind of minimalist prose. And it is very rigidly done. There is hardly anyone else in Sweden who can write like this. “

Lisa Bjurwald nominated for the Raoul Wallenberg Prize

Lisa Bjurwald is nominated for the Raol Wallenberg Prize 2018.

Lisa Bjurwald is an award winning journalist, author, lecturer and expert on xenophobia whose reportage books about the extreme right have been translated into several languages.

Bjurwald has been working as a journalist for more than 20 years, including being an editor of major newspapers Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet, as a columnist in Expressen and Aftonbladet, editor of the Media World as well as having worked as a reporter in USA, London and Rome.
She has been nominated for the Media Medal of the Year and has won a journalist award from the European Parliament. Currently, she is editor-in-chief and responsible publisher for the magazine Author.

 

New book by Lars Lerin

Lars Lerin

A new book by author and artist Lars Lerin, Bare Skin.

Writing letters may seem to be an extinct art. Lars Lerin and Kerstin Högstrand prove that this is not the case. In this book they collect letters and pictures that the two friends sent to each other in 2006-2009.

The texts are personal, private and yet open, an ongoing conversation about all the things that makes what we call life. There are high and low, big and small emotions: concerns for diseases and for the future, changes of the year, long and short trips, the loved cats and the loneliness when friends go away. Not least, here is Lars’s story about the love for Junior, the man he learns to know during this time.

Lars Lerin and Benny Andersson in new audio book

Lars Lerin

The audio book And the bird flew boldly in search of its cage, by Lars Lerin with music by Benny Andersson is just released!

So finally they meet, Lars Lerin and Carl Larsson, two of Sweden’s most beloved artists of two different centuries, meeting each other for the first time, here and now. They meet through their letters and cards from their constant travel, in the love of their homeland. The letters and the cards are the link to the home and the familiar, to everyday life. The ground they anyhow walk on, that is always present in their travel. And finally the insight; every road leads back home.

“Home! It is such a strange word! These four letters form a concept that can get a young cynic to smile and old sailors to blow their noses unusually persistent. What home is, one must go out in the world to learn. “

Lars Lerin in a huge format

Swedish Radio about the exhibition by artist Lars Lerin, this summer at Liljewalchs Art Hall in Stockholm.

Liljevalchs Art Hall in Stockholm shows a large exhibition this summer showing one hundred works by Lars Lerin. Lerin, who has become 64 years old, is today one of the country’s most famous artists, he has published fifty-six books and is a popular television personality.

It’s a true summer exhibition, you can already see the queues ringing over the small island of Djurgården in Stockholm for its interior. And Liljevalch’s is also a very good venue for Lerin’s work. He often works in very large format – especially for watercolor paintings – and it really makes sense in Liljevalch’s large halls. If you enter one of the biggest rooms, for example, you’ll see a giant piece of work: three paintings of long bookshelves, hundreds of booksheets and pamphlets and folders, a patinting that is 24 meters in size. It’s like a private library, forgotten archives at a local office, all at the same time. It’s great to be surrounded by  … life, like somewhere between poems and declaration papers.

Will people recognize their Lerin? Both yes and no, I think. Here are some of his traditional motifs like ships and birds, birches and power lines, dark and light, gray homes in the evening…
But there are also a series of great paintings from the war in Syria and the devastation there. They have a subdued sandy color scale, lots of small, secluded,  houses at a long distance, and completely grim, untouched urban environments.

Syria images are a meeting between Lerin’s earlier impressions from the Middle East and what he then watched television from the war.  It is as though we are still in “Lerinia” – rather than in Syria.

Film rights for The heroines of Kalmar sold

The Heroines of Kalmar

The film rights for the book, The heroines of Kalmar, by author Tove Folkesson is sold with a 1 year option to Nordic Factory Film.

Jenna, Linden, Jossan, Sudden – and Eva Zackrisson. They are Kalmar’s hunters. The unsuccessful, who seek their identity in the exclusion and each other. They are prepared to do everything for each other and not to be like the handball girls. The nearby city of Kalmar is the world to which they are sentenced, but nobody can prevent them from trying to blast the walls, trample the roses, deceive the guards – or Eva from despairing away. But they have to pay a high price. Just as high as the Öland Bridge.
At grandmother Stickan on the island of Öland Eva licks the wounds, many years later. Grandma Stickan offers what her parents never were able to give: a kitchen table with worn cloth, coffee and cake, calmness. But Eva has to return to Kalmar again.

“SEVEN WORDS above our heads, like glories, like a mantra. They lay in each and every handbag, stuck under the shoe soles, written in original language with a pencil on the Sudd’s arms. The mantra was almost solemn in simplicity. You can never have too much eye shadow. “

Converations with Women in Moscow by Carola Hansson to be published in Germany

The cultbook, Conversations with Women in Moscow (Unerlaubte Gespräche mit Moscauer Frauen) by author Carola Hansson and Karin Liden will be published in Germany.

In spring 1978, Karin Lidén and Carola Hansson traveled to Moscow to interview a number of Soviet women about the conditions of the Soviet Union. They met the women through private contacts, not officially. They talked to them in Russian and recorded interviews on bands later smuggled out of the country.

Thirteen of these conversations are reported in the Conversation with Women in Moscow book. What especially interested them was how the women themselves saw their conditions. Were they aware and discussed their situation? What did they see as problems and what solutions did they think there was, if any? Was there any wish to break the invasive gender role pattern? And how did they find themselves in their dual roles?

They were surprised at how freely the women they met told about their lives, about living in the Soviet, about work, marriage, politics, sex… It was no bright picture they met, “it’s awful when the woman speaks. Then it’s the reality that speaks, then the real pain comes forth “, as one of the interviewed formulations.

Conversations with women in Moscow is previously published in USA, United Kingdom and in Japan.

New book by Annika Estassy

Annika Estassy has done it again! New book just released, Looking for Green fingers. The book is open for submissions and sample translation in English is available.

It’s summer in Måneby, Agnes favorite season. But this year nothing is alike. A disease has hit Agnes so she can not manage to care for her beloved garden anymore. In addition, in a short moment she now regrets, she promised her neighbor to take care of his parrot while he is traveling around the world. What should she do?

Many miles south, outside the city of Stockholm, lives Leyla with her husband Johan and their six-year-old son Hugo. After Johan crossed the border in one of his rage outings, Leyla decided to move away with Hugo for a while. She answers an advertisement for a small cabin that is rented in exchange for nursing and care, and she ends up in Måneby. The following weeks will be the recovery that Leyla longed for, even though she knows that she cannot stay away forever. Is her marriage possible to save? Does she even want that?

And Agnes, she also has life-changing decisions to make, but of a different kind. Looking for Green fingers is a story about vulnerability, but also about women’s friendship, the wisdom of living and the healing power of a garden.

Looking for green fingers is released by Norstedts in Sweden.

 

The two Gardens by Carola Hansson sold to Germany

The novel The two Gardens (Der Schatten den Leoparden) by author Carola Hansson is sold to Germany.

The two Gardens is Carola’s fourth novel. During the work of the three earlier, she had slowly begun to realize how strongly her perception of reality is characterized by the contrast between light and darkness. Between dazzling, life-giving light and creativity, mysterious darkness – but also between two forms of death: imagination and chaos.

The main character in the novel is a Swedish botanist, Viktor – a person with many problems, as much a dreamer as a realist.

Viktor travels to Central America where he meets his friend Leonard who settled down in the rainforest to turn it into the national park. While Viktor moves through the tropical landscape, he makes another journey in time, back to the day in Helsinki when he first met the woman who would be his wife. Actually, the whole journey about love between them deals and is deeper a journey in memory that forces Viktor to face his own inner contradictions.

Welcome Erika Scott

Welcome to the agency Erika Scott!

Erika Scott works as the head of feature at the Swedish national daily newspaper Aftonbladet.
 
See you in Disneyland is her debut novel. The story is an accurate depiction of modern relationships, our battle with love, infidelity and the need to control.
What happens to people when life gives them an ultimatum? Can a marriage, filled with secrets, survive? 
 

See you in Disneyland is a bold novel, which won’t leave anyone untouched. She is currently writing on her second novel.

Welcome Tove Folkesson

Welcome to the agency, Tove Folkesson!

Tove Folkesson was born in Stockholm but raised in Kalmar in the South part of Sweden. She has written poetry, is a musician and has, among other things, taught Swedish and writing in Stockholm.

Her debut novel The heroines of Kalmar was released in 2014 and nominated for the Borås Newspaper Debute Prize, the Catapult Prize and the Swedish Radio’s Novel Prize. Her follow-up novels Bay and Song of Öland have also been honored and praised by both readers and the media.

In 2017 she was rewarded the prestigious SVD’s Literary Prize as well as the Bonnier Scholarship Award. She is also honored with Aftonbladet Culture Prize this year

Baby Blues by Ester Roxberg

A new book is here by author Ester Roxberg, Baby Blues!

A mother wanders alone around with the stroller in 30-degree Stockholm in the middle of July. All friends are away on vacation and there is nowhere to go with a small baby, in addition to the open preschool and parent group she attends. The daily life surrounds her like a wet blanket, and she lives in her own emotional microcosm. Who has she been? And above all: Who will she become?

I walk like a nobody behind the stroller and press it forward with all my might. I go over old chewing gums stuck and shaped into round, dark tracks on the road. I still have not gotten used to this. I still wonder who is walking here with this stroller. I look at the people around me, wondering what it is they see when they look back at me. I would like to ask them. What did you see before, when it was just me? Does it show that I’m a mother now? I am no longer Agnes, twenty-nine years, the receptionist. How have I changed? What does this new me really want?

In Baby Blues the author circles around issues of parenting and of belonging. How does one go about to remain an independent person when the outside world so intensely want to insert another, when one’s life is defined by what they do rather than who they are? Baby Blues is an amusing but disturbing novel right here and now – a blues over all things transience that has an unusual sound of solfège and sharpness.

Published in Sweden by Wahlstrom & Widstrand.

New historical novel by Kristina Sjögren

The Female King by author Kristina Sjögren is now released in Sweden and open for submissions.

The year is 1632 and Sweden had its first female king in modern times. In this novel, we follow Christina’s journey to power – and her struggle for freedom.

At the age of twenty eight, Christina abdicates and flees Sweden under great secrecy. The myths about her has been growing for centuries. But how does she see herself? What did she dream about and why did she refuse to marry?

In the 1600s, Sweden was waging endless wars on the continent. The streets of Stockholm had never ending raging fires and  the people was suffering from diseases, beggar staggers out among pigs, feces and corpses. At this time a girl is growing up in the castle Tre Kronor. Still just a small girl, but also the king. Christina refuses to be a puppet. She bides her time: she educates herself, learns how to hunt, how to ride. And when she reaches legal age, she is challenging Chancellor Axel Oxenstierna on power. But it soon becomes apparent that Christina is fighting a more important struggle within herself: the struggle for freedom.

The female King is a fascinating novel about being a woman in a male-dominated world. It recreates the vibrant power Sweden had at this time in Europe, the woman who lived it, and the power game at the royal court.

Lars Lerin and Karl Ove Knausgaard

 

Lars Lerin has created the covers and illustrations in the book Winter by author Karl Ove Knausgaard, the book is sold world wide.

The second volume in his autobiographical quartet based on the seasons, Winter is an achingly beautiful collection of daily meditations and letters addressed directly to Knaugsaard’s unborn daughter.

2 December – It is strange that you exist, but that you don’t know anything about what the world looks like. It’s strange that there is a first time to see the sky, a first time to see the sun, a first time to feel the air against one’s skin. It’s strange that there is a first time to see a face, a tree, a lamp, pajamas, a shoe. In my life it almost never happens anymore. But soon it will. In just a few months, I will see you for the first time.

In Winter, we rejoin the great Karl Ove Knausgaard as he waits for the birth of his daughter. In preparation for her arrival, he takes stock of the world, seeing it as if for the first time. In his inimitably sensitive style, he writes about the moon, water, messiness, owls, birthdays–to name just a handful of his subjects. These oh-so-familiar objects and ideas he fills with new meaning, taking nothing for granted or as given. New life is on the horizon, but the earth is also in hibernation, waiting for the warmer weather to return, and so a contradictory melancholy inflects his gaze.

Startling, compassionate, and exquisitely beautiful, Knausgaard’s writing is like nothing else. Somehow, he shows the world as it really is, at once mundane and sublime.