When the book Vinternoveller by the Norwegian author Ingvild Rishøi was published in 2014, it became a major success in Norway and is now compulsory reading for many Norwegian high school students. In Sweden, it was translated into Swedish only five years later by the small, newly started Flo publishing company.

- This publisher that I started is very much based on the fact that I have discovered that there is a long line of fantastic Norwegian authorship that does not exist in Swedish, says Nils Sundberg, translator and co-founder of Flo publishing company.

Short stories about poverty

Nils Sundberg, together with the publisher Stephen Farran-Lee (Nature and Culture) has translated Vinternoveller into Swedish. Now together with Ingvild Rishøi, they have won the Kulturhuset City Theater's international literary award, which praises international writers and their Swedish translators.

"In his shocking Winternoveller , Ingvild H. Rishøi embodies with the emotional empathy the stress that poverty and vulnerability cause," reads part of the motivation. The book contains three short stories that describe vulnerable and poor children and parents who are all trying to cope in a dark winter in Norway.

- It is about people who live in a welfare state, but have ended up outside. I see where I live, in a suburb of Oslo. I see children walking and they have no hiking shoes, and they get wet on their feet. That makes me concerned, says Ingvild Rishøi.

Big brother complex

Nils Sundberg thinks that far more books are translated from Swedish to Norwegian than the other way around, and that this applies to the cultural exchange between the countries in general - the Norwegians consume more Swedish culture than we consume Norwegian culture.

The widely distributed literature offering is something that Nils Sundberg wants to help to smooth out through the publication at Flo publishing company, which fetches its literature from the countries around the North Sea.

- It is probably some kind of big brother complex I think. It can be a huge debate in Norway about something that nobody has control over here. It is only when Knausgård has written something that we pay attention to it, he says.