Antiquity

Hanna Johansson began her writing career as a critic and essayist covering topics like fashion, literature, art, and performance, and currently works as the art editor at the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. Her debut novel, Antiquity, was awarded the Katapultpriset Prize in 2021.Kira Josefsson is a writer and translator working between English and Swedish. She is the recipient of grants from the PEN/Heim Translation Fund and the Swedish Arts Council. She writes about the intersection of politics, literature, and identity for both Swedish and English-language publications.

‘Elegantly translated … [Antiquity] sets up a literary conversation with works such as Death in Venice and Nabokov’s Lolita. Like those novels, plot is secondary to the meticulous creation of a predator’s interior landscape. And the narrator of Antiquity is as compelling a problem as Humbert Humbert or Aschenbach – as with them, power and responsibility are inverted and sublimated into diaphanous aesthetics, confronting the reader with pointed questions about the nature of beauty, and of art’s power to do harm.’