Chair no. 5 – Ingrid Carlberg
Author and journalist.
Elected: 2021.
In her broadly creative non-fiction, Ingrid Carlberg combines academic precision and journalistic curiosity, while also highlighting the historical context surrounding the person or event being portrayed.
Born in 1961 and raised in Surahammar in central Sweden, Ingrid Carlberg now lives outside Stockholm. She studied political science, economics and literature. Between 1990 and 2010, she worked for Dagens Nyheter, where she specialised in literary and investigative features and also contributed to the editorial page. From 2012 to 2013, she was a visiting professor of journalism at the University of Gothenburg.
Carlberg made her debut as an author of children’s literature with the chapter book Jag heter Rosalie (My Name’s Rosalie 2001). This was soon followed by two more books in the same series: Rosalie på djupt vatten (Rosalie in Deep Water, 2003) and Rosalies hemliga kompis (Rosalie’s Secret Friend, 2005). Her young adult novel Min bror Benjamin (My Brother Benjamin, 2004) portrays the complex psychological dynamics surrounding a bullied boy.
With the feature work Pillret. En berättelse om depressioner och doktorer, forskare och Freud, människor och marknader (The Pill. A Story About Depressions and Doctors, Researchers and Freud, People and Markets, 2008), Carlberg began her principal career as a non-fiction writer. The book received the Guldspaden award for investigative journalism, and in 2010, she was awarded an honorary doctorate in medicine at Uppsala University.
Carlberg has written two extensive biographies. The first of these, “Det står ett rum här och väntar på dig …” Berättelsen om Raoul Wallenberg (“There Is a Room Here Waiting for You...” The Story of Raoul Wallenberg, 2012), is the result of prodigious archival research shedding new light on Wallenberg’s life, including his unknown fate in Soviet captivity. The book was awarded the 2012 August Prize for the year’s best non-fiction book in Swedish. The second work, Nobel. Den gåtfulle Alfred, hans värld och hans pris (Nobel. The Enigmatic Alfred, His World and His Prize, 2019), portrays Nobel’s days as a scientist, the historical context in which he worked and his cosmopolitan life. Here too, the narrative is based on archival studies carried out in several different countries and the scrutiny of thousands of letters. Carlberg exhaustively maps Nobel’s connections with contemporary intellectuals, including the Austrian writer and Peace Prize laureate Bertha von Suttner. The book sheds new light on the drama of the harrowing family disputes over Nobel’s will.
In her latest book, Marionetterna. En berättelse om världen som politisk teater (Marionettes. A Story About the World as Political Theatre, 2023), she discusses remotely controlled influence campaigns, from the Berlin and Paris of the interwar period to the troll farms and viral public outcries of our time.
Carlberg describes her method as ‘creative non-fiction’, where the aim is to create broader narratives, rather than mere biographical portraits. In describing a living historical context, she creates a piece of mentality history with regard to the people and environments she portrays. The reader accompanies the author through extended periods in her archival research, interviews and travel. In creating her literary non-fiction narratives, Carlberg combines academic-level scholarly precision with the curiosity of an investigative journalist.
In 2020, Carlberg was awarded His Majesty the King’s Medal for her ‘significant contributions as an author’. In addition to her work as a writer, she has been a board member of organisations such as PEN Sweden and the Swedish Publicists’ Association.
Ingrid Carlberg succeeded the sinologist, author and translator Göran Malmqvist on chair number 5 of the Swedish Academy.
Ingrid Carlberg will succeed Mats Malm as Permanent Secretary, starting June 1 2026 »