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SWEDE OF THE WEEK

AUTHOR

August Prize-winning author Göran Rosenberg

In a new series profiling Swedish newsmakers, The Local gets the lowdown on author and journalist Göran Rosenberg, who won Sweden’s most prestigious prize for literature on Monday.

August Prize-winning author Göran Rosenberg

Göran Rosenberg took home the August Prize in Stockholm this week for his novel Ett Kort Uppehåll På Vägen Från Auschwitz (“A Short Break on the Road from Auschwitz”).

The book, published by Albert Bonniers Förlag in mid-September, is based on the wartime journey of Rosenberg’s father from the Auschwitz concentration camp to Södertälje, a town south-west of Stockholm.

“The book has meant a whole lot to me, much more than the writing of it,” he told the audience as he collected his 100,000 kronor ($15,100) in prize money, wrote the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper (SvD).

The prize is named after Swedish author and playwright August Strindberg and awarded by the Swedish Publishers’ Association (Svenska Förläggareföreningen), with prizes for excellence in fiction, non-fiction, and children’s and youth literature.

The Swedish author nosed out star footballer Zlatan Ibrahimovic for the non-fiction prize, even though the striker’s biography was also a favourite to win, at least among sport fans.

But while Zlatan’s story of growing up with immigrant parents in Sweden may not score him any literary awards this time around, Rosenberg’s story about his own immigrant parents proved to be the right formula to win the 24th August Prize.

“This isn’t a book about the Holocaust, it’s a book about my father, myself, and Sweden after the war. But to understand the baggage my father carried to this little town, I was forced retrace his path,” Rosenberg said at the ceremony.

Rosenberg himself was born in 1948 in Södertälje, Stockholm, to Polish parents from Lódz. Both parents survived concentration camps in the Second World War, and it was his father’s journey out of Poland via Germany that most intrigued the writer.

Rosenberg, who has referred to the book as a kind of “childhood memoir”, retraced the footsteps of his father as he was pulled out of the ghetto in Lódz to Auschwitz in 1944, then onward to a slave labour job at a truck manufacturing factory in Germany as the war ended.

Rosenberg has enjoyed an award-winning journalistic career. He has taken home at least nine major Swedish prizes for his reporting, including Sweden’s most prestigious prize for journalism, Stora Journalistpriset, in 1993.

His journalistic career included stints at Sveriges Radio (SR) and Sveriges Television (SVT) and he has been a columnist at the Dagens Nyheter newspaper.

Rosenberg’s work is not limited to print, however, and he has produced a number of award-winning documentaries, even claiming the Golden Nymph prize in 1990.

But the accolades don’t end there, as Rosenberg also holds an honorary doctorate from Gothenburg University.

Now, as Rosenberg’s eighth book makes its way to Christmas wish-lists across Sweden, the author is faced with one more question.

“I was writing this in my head for 30 years,” he told the audience at the prize ceremony.

“The big problem is what to do now.”

Take a look at our past Swedes of the Week.

Oliver Gee

Follow Oliver on Twitter here

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BOOKS

INTERVIEW: ‘My goal is to dig up the outrageous facts about Switzerland that startle you’

"Why do the Swiss have such great sex?" That's the title of a new book by Swiss/American author Ashley Curtis which reveals a Switzerland you never knew existed. The Local spoke to him recently to find out more.

INTERVIEW: 'My goal is to dig up the outrageous facts about Switzerland that startle you'
Photo courtesy of Ashley Curtis.

Covering everything from cow suicides to free heroin for addicts and the real story of William Tell, Curtis's book is a humorous yet serious take on a country that often finds itself reduced to a handful of stereotypes.

“I wanted to answer the questions about Switzerland no one would ever think of asking,” the author told The Local, speaking of the inspiration behind the book.

The writer has had plenty of time to dwell on the mysteries of Switzerland. He attended primary school here, visited regularly in the years that followed, and then worked for over 20 years at the independent Ecole d’Humanité school in the canton of Bern, where he taught maths and physics in the morning and climbing and ski touring in the afternoon.

Curtis’s scientific bent is clear in “Why do the Swiss have great sex?”. Some of the most inspired sections delve deep into statistics (How much would it cost to buy Switzerland? Nine trillion Swiss francs, for the bits that are available. Could the whole world sleep in Switzerland? Yes. Although they wouldn’t have space to do much else.).

Read also: Six authors who found inspiration in Switzerland

A lot of the pleasure in the book, though, comes from sheer surprise.

“The most fun sections to write were those where I had an inkling of the answer and then all the facts would fall into place.” he says.

“Then it was like a moment of breathlessness. As my girlfriend said, it's like these questions are trap doors to a whole other Switzerland.”

The section about what happens to Switzerland’s nuclear waste was one of these experiences. With nuclear power responsible for just over a third of the country’s electricity generation, Curtis wanted to know what happened to all that toxic waste.

“As I was looking into this, I learned it was shipped out of the country in huge steel containers and tested by a German government agency called BAM. You couldn't make it up,” Curtis says with delight.

Another section on energy generation also saw the Californian-born author encountering one of the rare obstacles to his research.

Operators at the Grande Dixence hydropower plant in Valais didn’t take kindly to his questions regarding the cleanliness of their power production after he noted they were actually using electricity from potentially dirty sources to pump water back up to their reservoir.

In fact, the book doesn’t shy away from the tough issues, with money-laundering dictators, the high number of foreign prisoners in Switzerland’s jails, and its poor record on homophobia all coming in for analysis.

“My goal was to dig up those outrageous things that startle you,” he explains.

So what still surprises Curtis about Switzerland?

“It’s the combination of conservatism and being completely open. On the one hand you have this unbelievable rigidity about the smallest things and then you have this acceptability of ideas that would be unthinkable in the US like legalized prostitution, free heroin for addicts and assisted suicide.”

And why do the Swiss have such great sex (at least according to a 2013 YouGov survey)?

To answer the question, Curtis takes readers on a historical tour of spa culture, seventeenth century dating rituals in canton Bern and modern-day sex education in Zurich kindergartens, which includes the use of wooden penises and plush vaginas (backed by the Supreme Court no less).

He also dives once more into the world of statistics but concludes with an answer no one can really argue with.

“Nations don’t have sex. People do.”

“Why Do The Swiss Have Such Great Sex: Extraordinary Answers to 66 Improbable Questions about Switzerland” is published by Bergli Books. It can be purchased here.