Chair no. 14 – Steve Sem-Sandberg
Author and critic
Inducted 2021
Steve Sem-Sandberg has taken a keen interest in the culture and history of Central Europe, a subject that has greatly influenced his fiction writing.
Steve Sem-Sandberg was born in Oslo in 1958 to Norwegian parents, but moved to Sweden at an early age. He grew up in Vendelsömalm to the south of Stockholm, and attended secondary school at the École Française in the capital. Since 2008, he has been working as a critic for the newspaper Dagens Nyheter, having previously shared a long association with Svenska Dagbladet’s culture editorial team, including being editor of its essay section ‘Under strecket’ (Under the Line) and, for a period, deputy culture director.
Although he currently resides in Stockholm, Sem-Sandberg has spent long periods living in Prague and Vienna, which has clearly influenced his writing. His knowledge of Central European culture and experiences of the rapid transformation of Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall were collated in the book Den kluvna spegeln. En resa genom det andra Europa (The Divided Mirror. A Journey Through the Other Europe, 1991). A decade later, he further immersed himself in his studies with the essay collection Prag (no exit) (Prague (No Exit), 2002), in which he leads the reader through the city’s literary heritage in the company of guides such as Franz Kafka and Vladimír Holan. These two books can be described as cross-genre works, in which travelogue and feature writing coexist under the umbrella of the essay. This literary hybrid form was also evident in his earlier collection of cultural criticism I en annan del av staden (In Another Part of the City, 1990).
Sem-Sandberg’s studies of Central European history have also permeated his fiction writing, and it is perhaps primarily as a novelist that he is known to his readers. In De ansiktslösa (The Faceless, 1987), he offers new perspectives on the novel as an art form. Since that work, he has developed his writing in various different directions, giving close attention to subjects such as power structures and identity, conflicts of ideology and the suffering that Nazism and the Second World War visited upon European 20th-century history.
Several of his works are documentary in nature. Three of his novels are so closely related as to have been referred to as a trilogy: Theres (Therese, 1996), Allt förgängligt är bara en bild (All That Is Ephemeral Is Only a Picture, 2002) and Ravensbrück (2003). While it is possible to read them separately, they have also been published as a collection entitled Tre romaner (Three Novels, 2011). The books are primarily centred on the fates of three individuals: the West German terrorist Ulrike Meinhof, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke and Kafka’s translator Milena Jesenká, who was murdered at Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Sem-Sandberg made his major international breakthrough with the epic collective novels De fattiga i Łódź (2009; The Emperor of Lies, 2011) and De utvalda (2014; The Chosen Ones, 2016). Both novels examine the trauma brought about in Europe under Nazism. The first is set in the Jewish ghetto established by the Nazis in Łódź, the second in the Spiegelgrund clinic in Vienna, where interned children were subjected to horrific medical experiments and murdered in their hundreds. The same era is also portrayed in the novel Stormen (2016; The Tempest 2019), a retrospective of Quisling-era Norway in the wake of the Second World War.
His recent work has focused on the 19th-century German dramatist Georg Büchner and his unfinished play Woyzeck, which is one of the most performed in modern theatre history. Sem-Sandberg’s interest in the psychological mystery of the soldier Johann Christian Woyzeck, a Napoleonic War survivor who stabs a woman to death, led him to extensive archival studies of court records and other forensic material. His research resulted in the novel W (2019) and subsequent short story collection Jägarna i Armentières: Büchnervariationer (The Hunters of Armentières: Büchner Variations, 2020), which focuses on characters from Büchner’s play and from his short story ‘Lenz’. The books form a piece of mentality history, where the author’s use of language creates a sense of period, situating the psychological drama in an authentic 19th-century environment.
The novel Oceanen (The Ocean 2022) portrays the writer and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s forty-five days spent living on the Île Saint-Pierre in the autumn of 1765. In Sem-Sandberg's latest novel, De heligas stad (City of Saints 2025), the reader is transported to the city of Münster in 1534, when it becomes the scene of one of the bloodiest and most protracted conflicts of the Reformation.
Over the years, Sem-Sandberg has been awarded numerous prizes, including the August Prize in 2009 for The Emperor of Lies, the Sorescu Prize in 2007, the Samfundet De Nio Grand Prize in 2009 and the Eyvind Johnson Prize in 2020. His books have been translated into around thirty languages, and, in 2016, he was awarded France’s Prix Médicis Étranger for The Chosen Ones.
Steve Sem-Sandberg succeeded Kristina Lugn on chair number 14 of the Swedish Academy.