Sara Stridsberg

WINNER

Sara Stridsberg portrait

Biography

Sara Stridsberg, born in 1972, is a writer and playwright. Her first novel Happy Sally was published in 2004, and her breakthrough came two years later with the publication of The Faculty of Dreams, her second novel. Her third novel, Darling River, was published in 2010.

In addition to several important prizes, she has been shortlisted for the prestigious August Prize three times, the latest in 2012 for her collection of plays, Medealand. Stridsberg lives in Stockholm.

Nominated book : Beckomberga - ode till min familj (The Gravity of Love)

Summary

When Jimmie Darling is admitted to Beckomberga, a psychiatric hospital outside Stockholm, his daughter Jackie starts to spend increasing amounts of time there, and when her mother leaves for a holiday by the Black Sea, the hospital becomes Jackie’s whole world.

The doctor in charge is Edvard Winterson. On some evenings he takes Jimmie and a few other patients to big parties in town. As soon as they pass the gates in Edvard’s car, the first bottle of champagne is opened in the back seat. “One night beyond the confines of the hospital makes you human again,” he says to his patients.

At the hospital we also meet Inger Vogel, an “angelic nurse in clogs” who seems to inhabit the twilight zone between order and devastation, and the patient Sabina, the object of desire of both Jimmie and Dr Winterson, with her beads, her archery and obsession with freedom and death.

Beckomberga explores Jackie’s love for Jimmie and the way she reaches out for him, as a child and as a grown woman and mother. In Sara Stridsberg’s beautiful novel, the psychiatric hospital, set in a lovely park close to a lake, takes on almost mythical dimensions, both as a punishing angel and as a rescuer seeking to save distraught souls, like in an old utopian vision.

Beckomberga - ode till min familj (The Gravity of Love) book cover

Excerpts

Related publications

Various authors

Anthology
2015