Queen

Birgitta Trotzig (1929-2011) was one of the 20th century's most important Scandinavian voices. She grew up in Gothenburg and later in Kristianstad. From 1954 she lived with her family, first in Italy, then in France, and it was during this period that Birgitta Trotzig converted to Catholicism. Her years abroad put her in closer contact with European modernism and with the resistance to the Algerian War. On her return to Sweden, she began working as a critic and writing her debut, Ur de älskandes liv. She published the successful prose poetry collections Bilder (1954), Ett landskap (1959), and En berättelse från kusten (1961). Her novella Sveket (1966) is characterized by a search for the living word in a time of darkness. Her cultural criticism expresses a political commitment and a demand for the right to create without being tied down to ideologies, as well as the notion of an artistic language as a possible counter-language to the language of power, all evident in her essay collection Jaget och världen. Employing a language full of legend and paeans, Birgitta Trotzig lends a voice to the vulnerable and the tormented. She was elected to the Swedish Academy in 1993.

Saskia Vogel was born and raised in Los Angeles and now lives in Berlin, where she works as a writer, screenwriter, and translator from Swedish and German into English. In 2021 she was awarded the Berlin Senate grant for non-German literature, an English PEN Translates Award, and was a PEN America Translation Prize finalist. She was Princeton's Fall 2022 Translator in Residence. Permission (2019), her debut novel, was published in five languages and was longlisted for the Believer Book Award. Alongside Queen, Vogel will translate Trotzig's canonical novel, The Marsh King's Daughter, and her essay collection, The I and the World.

Hanne Ørstavik published the debut novel Cut in 1994. Her literary breakthrough came three years later with the publication of Love (Kjærlighet), which in 2006 was voted the 6th best Norwegian book of the last 25 years in a prestigious contest in Dagbladet, and won the 2019 PEN Translation Prize. Her books Ti Amo, The Pastor, and now Stay with Me have made her one of the most celebrated contemporary Norwegian writers.