Gothenburg Book Fair: Looking for the next big thing

It’s 2014, a Thursday morning in late September and people are dodging trams to get to the entrance of the Swedish Exhibition Centre in Gothenburg. They have come for the Gothenburg Book Fair, the largest in Northern Europe. The SEC a glamorous venue, attached to a skyscraper with a fine dining restaurant at the top that must have seemed the height of mid-90s luxury. It is a transient space occupied by a captive market of business travellers and salespeople drinking overpriced, overbrewed coffee. The general public are not allowed in until the Friday afternoon, so an exclusive crowd of publishers, writers, translators and librarians mingle around the hundreds of stalls. Sweden may have a population lower than ten million, yet it has a book scene to rival far bigger countries. Each year Stockholm’s cultural, political and publishing elite decamp to the west coast to eat canapés, close deals, be seen and market themselves to the world.

One of the big stories this year is the Swedish rapper Ken Ring, whose autobiography, Life, is about to hit the shelves. Ken is the bad boy of the Swedish music scene – he was once arrested for performing a track in which he said he would storm the Royal Palace in Stockholm and have his way with one of the princesses. Life is supposedly a brutal and honest insight into his upbringing and his route to localised rap stardom, but being Sweden you cannot get rich or die trying once the top tax rate kicks in. Over at the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet’s stand, the feminist comic book writer Liv Ströumqvist sits chatting with two journalists. There are not enough seats for the crowd as they spill out into the adjacent stalls. International publishers stand about, with no idea what is going on. At their sides, agents and marketing people try and catch their ear in strange Swedish approximations of LA English. Strömqvist produces some of the most hilarious, thought-provoking and unashamedly laconic graphic work around. Her brilliant Prince Charles’ Feeling was released in French, but so far no English publishers have taken the gamble on her unique brand of darkly humorous feminist comics. Her contemporary Lina Neidestam has suffered the same fate – a gifted graphic artist with a killer eye for pseuds and self-analysis, Neidestam deserves a bigger audience.

The real business, though, takes place upstairs in the international rights centre. A series of tables set up like a speed dating event looks out onto the trams humming past in the rain. For twenty minutes at a time, Nordic publishers fire names and titles at international reps, all sounding convinced they have the next international hit on their hands. People are still pushing crime heavily, with books being sold before the Swedish versions have even gone to print on a wave of buzz and hype. Now though there is another word on everyone’s lips: feelgood.

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"International publishers stand about, with no idea what is going on"

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After the success of The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared and The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules, feelgood is where it’s at. Everyone is feeling feelgood, and the publishers are feeling good about feelgood’s export potential. Crime is a steady banker, but stories about quirky Scandinavians that fit nicely onto suburban IKEA bookshelves are a growth market. This makes it harder for non-genre novels to make the jump into English. After a four-year break, John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Heaven’s Beach will be a departure from the usual when it arrives next year. Similarly, the Twin Peaks-inspired pop horror of the Engelsfors trilogy by Mats Strandberg and Sara Bergmark Elfgren has been a slow burner, the final book appearing this February. Crime may be losing its sheen, but it still sells by the truckload to audiences eager for maverick policemen and a touch of the exotic.

Over at the stall of a small publisher, the Scottish-Swedish illustrator Josefin Sundqvist signs copies of her new book, The Paper Tree. The hall is dotted with small publishers, some no more than garage businesses, pushing out books that the big export giants don’t deem worth the bother. Likewise, fan-circles and societies celebrating the work of long-gone greats get their own block. The stall for fans of veteran leftist heavyweight Jan Myrdal is manned by Jan Myrdal himself as if the Berlin Wall were barely cracked. Among the crime writers and promo stands for digital publishing he cuts a lonely, anachronistic figure. There will be few international agents sniffing out his latest novel, written in 1955 and lost in an East German library for half a century.

By the middle of the afternoon everyone has had too much Swedish coffee and the cinnamon buns are running low. People drift toward seminars with spare chairs. At one of them an academic, a translator and a journalist are doing a Q&A on trends. Given the last word, the journalist comes back to the feelgood factor. Later that night, half of Gothenburg pack into a supposedly secret party at a hotel on Avenyn, the city’s main street. Ken Ring is there again, standing on the street corner. Inside, a successful thriller writer nervously texts on his phone by the men's toilets, abandoned by his publisher.

Being big in Sweden is no guarantee of international success, but Gothenburg is a shop window for a particularly marketable version of the country. If you can talk a good game here then there is a lot of money to be made, but when selling, Sweden is about the spreadsheets as much as the reviews; don’t think what the world sees is the best the country has to offer.

Five to look up:

The Engelsfors Trilogy – Sara B. Elfgren and Mats Strandberg
Mixing pop horror, shades of Buffy and Twin Peaks, these tales of smalltown Sweden beset by demons and creatures of the night are now appearing in full in English. They are currently being re-written as graphic novels, with a film perhaps also on the cards.

Jogo Bonito – Henrik Brandao Jönsson
Brazilian football is world famous for being both beautiful and tragic. Henrik Brandao Jönsson’s football travelogue is a trip through the history of the beautiful game in Brazil, but also an eloquent description of the changing state of the country itself.

Me on the Floor, Bleeding – Jenny Jägerfeld
More than your average teenage novel, Jägerfeld’s story of a troubled girl carrying real and psychological injuries is darker than crises of boys and exam results. A big hit among older readers, it is as disturbing as it is good.

The Winter War – Philip Teir
Finnish/Swedish writer Teir’s tale of a successful middle class man in the midst of crisis cuts straight through the tradition of the Nordic fairytale. In a stagnant marriage with children who have moved away, The Winter War is a cold analysis of the material comforts of success.

Heaven’s Beach – John Ajvide Lindqvist
Just out in Swedish and certain to be picked up by a UK publisher, Lindqvist’s first novel in four years is a dark fantasy in which a camping trip turns into an absurd journey across an endless landscape of clipped green grass and blue sky, when reality suddenly vanishes. The author of Let The Right One In has written a truly directionless book.