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CULTURE

Welcome to The Local Sweden’s Book Club

The Local Sweden's Book Club is a place to learn about Swedish culture through reading, and we want you to be involved.

Published: 14 March 2019 14:04 CET
Updated: 30 September 2020 08:18 CEST
Welcome to The Local Sweden's Book Club
In a country with libraries this beautiful, how could you not be inspired to read more? File photo: Jann Lipka/imagebank.sweden.se

If you love books, want to learn more about Sweden, or to connect with like-minded people, The Local Sweden's Book Club is for you. You don’t need to speak Swedish or even be located in Sweden to take part, and it's free to join.

So how does it work?

Each month we read a different book with a connection to Sweden (chosen by Book Club members) and chat about it in person and in our dedicated Facebook group, which you can join here.

We're doing this because understanding a country doesn't just mean following the news, but also discovering its culture and reading its literature. For 15 years we've been reporting the news in Sweden, and our community of readers includes long-term expats, new arrivals, Swedes living abroad, and people who have never visited the country. This is our chance to read and talk about Sweden together. 

We cover a range of genres, going beyond Nordic noir to read fiction and non-fiction by a diverse range of writers, and we began with the wartime diaries kept by one of Sweden's most famous authors, Pippi Longstocking creator Astrid Lindgren.

This variety allows us to explore different parts of the country, and even different periods in its history, from between the pages of its best books.

Reading might be something we usually do in solitude, but something special happens when people come together to read, as you'll know if you've ever read a child's favourite story out loud to them, or read a book on a recommendation from a friend and found it helped you understand them in a new way.

In June we'll be reading Factfulness by Hans Rosling.

Our previous books are:

2019
April: A World Gone Mad: The Diaries of Astrid Lindgren 1939-45
May: Quicksand by Malin Persson Giolito
June: The Little Old Lady Who Broke all the Rules by Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg
July: Everything I Don't Remember by Jonas Hassen Khemiri
August: Never Stop Walking By Christina Rickardsson
September: Wolf Winter by Cecilia Ekbäck 
October: A Sister in my House by Linda Olsson 
November: Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell
December: Fishing in Utopia – Sweden and the Future That Disappeared by Andrew Brown

2020
January: The Serious Game by Hjalmar Söderberg
February: Beartown by Fredrik Backman
March: The Circle by Sara B Elfgren & Mats Strandberg
April: The Red Address Book by Sofia Lundberg
May: The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson

Click the links above to read what those books were about, and what Book Club members thought of them.

Throughout 2019, we held five events in Stockholm, and kicked off with a talk about Astrid Lindgren and discussion of her wartime diaries on World Book Day, April 23rd. 

We also send out two to three newsletters a month with reflection on the month's book, and you can sign up for that by entering your email address below. 

And each month we try to interview the author and translator of the book we read where possible, putting Book Club members' questions to them. You can find all the interviews we've done so far below:

Above all, this is a community, and we're keen to hear from readers about your preferred genres or any book or event suggestions. Let us know what you'd like to get out of the Book Club! We do our best to select books that are widely available in translation and as e-books and audiobooks so that as many people as possible can take part, and will announce each title in advance so that we all have time to track down the book. 

If you'd like a say in how the Book Club is run and what we read, fill out the short survey below. You can also get in touch with us directly through email or, if you're a Member of The Local, by logging in to comment. The Local's Book Club is run by Catherine Edwards, and in 2019 has been supported by the European Journalism Centre's Engaged Journalism Accelerator.

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HISTORY

Do Taylor Swift’s ancestors really come from a small parish in rural Sweden?

A community history group has tried to get to the bottom of a persistent genealogy rumour surrounding US mega star Taylor Swift and a small parish in north-central Sweden.

Published: 15 May 2024 11:49 CEST
Do Taylor Swift's ancestors really come from a small parish in rural Sweden?

Lodged in the mountains between Östersund and Norway, Offerdal in the region of Jämtland is home to some 2,000 people. It may also be the ancestral home of Taylor Swift.

Or maybe not. It’s not entirely clear. Bear with us.

“It’s been written about in several newspapers since as long ago as 2014. Because specifically Offerdal and a village called Söderåsen are mentioned in those articles, we’ve been curious about this for a while,” Sara Swedenmark, chair of the Offerdal Community Association, told The Local.

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When Swift decided to launch her Eras Tour in Sweden (she’s set to perform in Stockholm on May 17th-19th), the group decided to look into her possible connection with Offerdal, which is mentioned on several American genealogy sites, but always without reference to a source.

During their research, they found two people from the area who could possibly be related to Swift. One of them is Olof Thorsson, who is the main person rumoured to be one of her ancestors.

“We can see that there are people who connect them, but in one place the line is broken because there’s a man who married several times. So we haven’t found a direct line of descent, but we’re not saying it doesn’t exist. Because we’re talking about around 1,200 people in 400 years, there could be other possibilities,” said Swedenmark.

A church in the parish of Offerdal. Photo: Offerdal/Wikimedia Commons

Thorsson travelled with his family in 1641 to New Sweden – a Swedish colony in what today are Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland – on board the ship Kalmar Nyckel. He is said to have committed a crime in Sweden and was sent abroad for penal labour.

“We haven’t found which crime he allegedly committed, even though there are conviction records from this time, which makes us doubt whether he actually lived here,” said Swedenmark.

“Another person who was banished from the country around this time in Offerdal received it as punishment for having put witchcraft on the neighbour’s cattle.”

An oil painting by Jacob Hägg, depicting the ship Kalmar Nyckel. Photo: Sjöfartsmuséet/Wikimedia Commons

But they also found another possible connection with Swift: a man known as Jöns The Black Smith Andersson, his wife Maria and their daughter Brita, who travelled to New Sweden in 1654.

“There seem to be certain relations here via half siblings in the early 18th century,” said Swedenmark, urging readers to reach out if they have more information. “The Church of Sweden started keeping population records in the later half of the 17th century, so it’s not completely straightforward to track down roots from this time.”

So in other words, nothing concrete that confirms that Swift does indeed descend from Offerdal, and the parish is not the only place in the world that’s purportedly connected to the artist. Genealogy company Ancestry claims she’s related to the American poet Emily Dickinson, and according to My Heritage she’s also related to France’s King Louis XIV and US actor Johnny Depp.

Offerdal, by contrast, is rather less grand. But what might life have been like at the time?

“Offerdal in the 17th century was an uneasy place, because Jämtland was being torn between the Swedish king and the Danish-Norwegian king,” explained Swedenmark. “There were a lot of wars in close succession and farms were seized if the owner swore their allegiance to the ‘wrong’ king. There were around 30 villages and 600 people in the parish.”

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