The August Prize was established 33 years ago to give star shine to the novels that sold, but also to save narrow books from oblivion: good for literature both as a commodity and art was the idea.
The moment of truth always applies to the nominations, especially when the yawning hall-stamped one has been selected, but tonight's winner rises from a fine selection, albeit with some missing names.
The winner in the trade class
, Nils Håkansson's Hidden Gods - A book about everything that is not lost in a translation is an educational party with high-profile gossip about all the infidelities and revelations that the art of translation can entail, written with a light hand and deep experience.
The translator can never be forgotten again, without revealing that you did not go to Håkansson's party.
The winner in the category children and youth, Johan Rundberg's historical crime trilogy about the orphanage girl Mika - where the first Nattkorpen was praised - takes us back to Dickens and the penny print's 19th century of orphanhood and class society.
Dark, mysterious, threatening.
The
winner of the
fiction class
, Elin Cullhed's Euphoria, is a fantasy about the poet Sylvia Plath, an obsessive and moving study of the porous boundary between life and fiction.
It does not read the iconic author with her tragic death as a key, but captures her as free, both in the garden in the 60s, and as a voice in our time.
If the August winners 2021 have anything in common, it is that they invite you to a serious problem that must be solved, which is visible from below and from within, which also puts the reader to the test.