How does it feel to be longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2024, and what would winning the prize mean to you? Would it also have an impact on literature originating from Sweden? 

It’s a great honour, of course, and very exciting and somewhat unreal to be longlisted for this award. I had no thoughts of translations or foreign nominations when I wrote the book, so I am quite overwhelmed by this. The thought of winning is not on my mind, but I assume – and hope – that it might mean that literature from Scandinavia would reach a larger audience abroad. 

What were the inspirations behind the book? What made you want to tell this particular story? 

I started just as the woman in the novel starts, in a COVID fever in April 2020, when I went to my bookshelf and picked up a random book that fell open in my hands, revealing a small inscription from the person who had given me the book 25 years earlier. At the feverish sight of these handwritten lines, I was struck by a very clear memory that played in a certain tone in my head, and from that experience, I simply started writing. 

How long did it take to write the book, and what does your writing process look like? Do you type or write in longhand? Are there multiple drafts? Is the plot and structure intricately mapped out in advance?  

It took me one and a half years to write it. It was a very slow process because I spent most days either deleting or rewriting everything, over and over again. I could start one working day with thirty pages and end it with twenty-five. It became my method in this project, the habit of tuning the piano before I could play it. There was never a ‘flow’ in the usual, speedy, sense, but there was certainly a flow in my head during the few moments when I was able to match the melancholic tone I heard with the text I was writing. It was an exhausting but very satisfying process. 

What was the experience of working with the book’s translator, Kira Josefsson, like? How closely did you work together on the English edition? Were there any surprising moments during your collaboration, or joyful moments, or challenges? 

It’s a great privilege to have a book translated into English, and very soon I realised that Kira was a total genius. I haven’t interfered with anything, of course; I just answered questions and felt this enormous admiration for her work. We discussed some small things that turned out to be specifically Swedish, like the construction of the (illegal) machine used for distilling alcohol, and words with different cultural connotations. It was a stimulating and pleasant dialogue for me, and I learned a lot. My spontaneous reaction when I read her manuscript was that this text is much better than the Swedish original. First of all, she captured the tone completely, which was my main concern. But there is also something with the lightness in Kira´s English that gives the text a new richness. 

Tell us about your reading habits. Which book or books are you reading at the moment, and why?  

I try to read as much as I can, in different genres, etc. As I see it, reading and writing are connected. At the moment, I’m reading some contemporary Scandinavian novels, Graham Greene, the plays of Lars Norén, and some non-fiction books on modern history. I seldom read out of duty, just for pleasure and whatever happens to come my way. 

What was your path to becoming a reader – what did you read as a child and what role did storytelling play in your younger years? Was there one book in particular that captured your imagination? 

I was very fond of Maria Gripe’s books. She had an element of superficiality in some of her novels which really captivated me. I also read Hermann Hesse in my early years and have clear memories of the intensity of Siddhartha. I remember our teacher in school (I was maybe 10) reading Roots by Alex Haley aloud for the class two or three times a week. I just loved how that epic story unfolded. There was never any silence in our class except during those hours. 

Tell us about a book that made you want to become a writer. How did this book inspire you to embark on your own creative journey, and how did it influence your writing style or aspirations as an author? 

I remember that the first 20 pages of Saturday by Ian McEwan inspired me when I started writing novels. This light clarity – I reread these first pages so many times trying to figure out how he was doing it. I still don’t know… 

Tell us about a book originally written in Swedish that you would recommend to English readers. How has it left a lasting impression on you? 

Lina Wolff’s novels are so well-written. I believe all of them are translated into English. I recommend starting with Carnality and The Polyglot Lovers. Her texts are brutal and complex, yet very nuanced. 

Do you have a favourite International Booker Prize-winning or shortlisted novel and, if so, why? 

I really admire Jenny Erpenbeck’s work. She tends to write different books each time and she also kind of streches the very form of a novel, which is very inspiring. I also appreciated Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, which I read during Christmas. 

What role do you think translated fiction plays in promoting a more inclusive and diverse literary canon, and how can we encourage more people to read it? 

A major role, I believe. Translators and interpreters are living bridges; they should swim in gold and honey. They play this fundamentally key role in the exchange between cultures, countries, and people. The importance is not just literary; it’s also political and, in some sense, human. I mean, who are we if we don’t connect with each other?

How does it feel to be longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2024 – an award which recognises authors and translators equally – and what would winning the prize mean to you?   

It’s an immense honor. Being longlisted is already a dream come true, especially in such esteemed company. I would be lying if I said I didn’t cry a little when I got the email. And winning? Winning would mean a chance for even more people to discover this gorgeous novel I love so much. It would also help poke a hole in the stubborn idea that you should only translate into your mother tongue; as someone who works from my first language into my second tongue, I’m far from the only translator who defies that idea, and it should’ve been shelved long ago. Most people’s relationships to language is more complex than that rigid binary.  

How long did it take to translate the book, and what does your working process look like? Do you read the book multiple times first? Do you translate it in the order it’s written?   

The Details started as a commission from Ia’s agency. I hadn’t read the novel before starting, and in fact I rarely do, because the exigencies of pay and time require me to work fast most of the time. This means that I tend to acquaint myself with the book as I put down a first, very rough draft, going from start to finish. Then I go over it again and again, homing in on an expression of the author’s voice in English while researching aspects I need to understand better to find that voice. With The Details it took no more than ten pages of that first draft to realize I had something very special on my desk, a feeling that only deepened during the two months I spent translating the novel. Once the rights sold, I spent a few more weeks finessing the manuscript, fiddling with punctuation and word choices, flipping the syntax of a sentence… It can be hard to stop, especially when you’re truly in love with a novel.   

Aside from the book, what other writing did you draw inspiration from for your translation?  

Ia builds this novel with sentences that are long and meandering, a quality that’s integral to the exploration of memory and time’s passage that makes up the humming bassline of the book. English is, of course, fond of brief, effective statements. Part of what’s fun about translation is getting to push and stretch linguistic conventions of the language you’re translating into, but of course it needs to be done elegantly or at least interestingly to work; it needs to make sense. In thinking about how to do that for this particular novel I looked, in particular, at Susan Bernofsky’s translation of Robert Walser’s Microscripts, a work very different in tone and concept but great for thinking about how a sentence can unfurl.  

What was your path to becoming a reader – what did you read as a child and what role did storytelling play in your younger years? Was there one book in particular that captured your imagination? 

My mom used to work as a librarian, and both she and my dad encouraged reading from an early age. I was hungry for the world as a child, attempting to read Shakespeare in English during fourth-grade reading periods, and over time I roamed the shelves from Astrid Lindgren to feel-good to C.S. Lewis to whatever Henry Miller my parents happened to have in the living room. The first time I remember thinking about style was reading Hjalmar Söderberg’s canonical Doctor Glas, an intensely atmospheric novel that captures a certain sensual side of Stockholm; blue nights hanging low over the cemetery, pale dusks, lemony moons. But I would basically read anything that found its way into my hands, including a lot of magazines and newspapers, a habit that I imagine has helped me in the translator’s task of ventriloquizing many different kinds of writing.  

Tell us about your path to becoming a translator. Were there any books that inspired you to embark on this career? 

I was always interested in languages, in the new view and texture offered by a different window onto the world. My mom is Finnish and though I never truly learned to speak the language, growing up in a multilingual environment definitely shaped me. I moved from Sweden when I was 18 and ultimately ended up in Canada, where I did my undergrad. By the time I’d finished college the English language was quite deep and vast in me, so I started doing some translations as part of my job as an editor at a bilingual magazine. I didn’t consider translation as a career, however, until I came across a novel called Araben by Pooneh Rohi (forthcoming as The Arab from longlisted MTO Press!). I was struck both by the Rohi’s writing and the fact that the book painted a picture of Sweden that was more complicated than the social democratic paradise a lot of foreigners seemed to picture when I told them where I was from. I really, really wanted to translate it. By that time I had moved to New York, and worked one day a week at a bookstore coffee shop where I happened to meet the Japanese translator Sam Bett. We got to talking, I mentioned my project, and he pointed me in the direction of a bunch of resources that opened up a whole new world for me, a world that immediately felt like home.  

What are your reading habits under normal circumstances? Which book or books are you reading at the moment, and why?  

Generally, I try to read both in English and in Swedish. I’m currently recovering from ankle surgery and finally picked up Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey, a roaming story for a period of circumscribed movement. Her work, including the translator’s note and intro, is such a tour de force. (“Tell me about a complicated man”—whew, what an opening line!) I’m also listening to the audiobook of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi, highly recommended for a deep dive into a history many of our politicians and media outlets would do well to consider. 

Tell us about a book originally written in Swedish that you would recommend to English readers. How has it left a lasting impression on you? 

I love Harry Martinson’s Aniara, an epic space poem about a group of refugees fleeing an Earth ravaged by nuclear war and destruction. Their ship is thrown off course when it is hit by an asteroid, and the poem follows the passengers to their slow demise in the vast emptiness of outer space. It was published in 1956 and is eerily prescient in its themes of environmental grief and dislocation. I think of it often. The artist Fia Backström invited me to do a joint talk on the book a few years ago, and that’s when I learned that the two existing translations into English are, unfortunately, both old and out of print. I’ve nurtured a dream of retranslating it ever since.  

Which work of translated fiction do you wish you had translated yourself, and what aspects of this particular work do you admire most? 

Johannes Anyuru’s They Will Drown in Their Mother’s Tears (translated by Saskia Vogel) is incredible; so is, really, all of his writing. Thankfully both Saskia and his other translators, Nichola Smalley and Rachel Willson Broyles, are brilliant, so he’s in great hands. His prose has a quality that reminds me of Tomas Tranströmer – something about a kind of quiet spirituality suffusing everything, though in Anyuru’s case the writing is also intensely political. His work has grown increasingly dark over the years, but his view of life as sacred and on history as a felt, churning event, remain.  

Do you have a favourite International Booker Prize-winning or shortlisted novel and, if so, why? 

Annie Erneaux’s The Years, translated by Alison L. Strayer, mesmerized me, the way it produced a sense of standing in the river of time. Another is Boulder by Eva Baltasar, translated by Julia Sanches; what craggy, perfect jewels of sentences! 

What role do you think translated fiction plays in promoting a more inclusive and diverse literary canon, and how can we encourage more people to read it?  

It’s pretty obvious that anyone who isn’t reading literature in translation misses out on a wealth of stories and ideas. The English-speaking world already rubs up against so many other languages, has so many other languages in it, that limiting yourself to work originally written in English must be dreadfully boring. To me, reading in translation is less a political imperative than one of living a rich and varied life of the mind. I’m grateful for the presses and prizes that help readers find these books, and which allow us translators to spend our time moving between worlds.