Review
Crystalline... reads like poetry and myth at once. There are intricate layers of beauty and meaning here in sparse clusters across a vast new landscape as I've never read before. The music of this book is old, and it is new, and it is old - Tommy Orange, author of 'There, There'
Vividly captures the plight of the Sámi people... Lyrical and ambitious... Ædnan contains echoes of epic poems and Norse sagas but also feels contemporary and accessible... bold and original - Guardian
Remarkable... Like the best epics, Aednan is a story not just of a people but also of people, full of sonorous power yet shot through with an undeniable intimacy... Extraordinary - Washington Post
Mesmerising. A beautiful, poetic weaving of language, character and place... Evocative and heart-breaking -- Audrey Magee, author of 'The Colony'
Moves as gracefully as a waterfall... This unique novel beautifully conjures losses and transitions within the flickering shadows of language - Irish Times
A soul-gripping and enthralling journey into what it feels like to be othered in your own land... Axelsson offers us a profound invitation into understanding what it means to be deeply intertwined with nature -- Lola Akinmade Åkerström, author of 'In Every Mirror She’s Black'
A sharp-edged tale in verse of colonial suppression, resistance, and survival - Kirkus Reviews, starred review
Incredibly beautiful and magnificent... With Ædnan, Swedish literature has been enriched - Dagens Nyheter
Not only a linguistic adventure, innovative and rooted in both traditions and renewal, but also a statement that we are bigger and freer than the borders that shut us out from each other... Remarkable and magnificent - Norrtelje Tidning
Eagerly as with any page-turner, I rush through the century that Axelsson's poem encompasses - Svenska Dagbladet
A work that is unlike anything else in contemporary Swedish literature. It is a family chronicle, a political history, an indictment - in verse, albeit a free one. An epic, quite simply... Axelsson boldly writes herself into a time-honoured tradition - Sydsvenskan
About the Author
Linnea Axelsson is a Sámi-Swedish writer, born in the province of North Bothnia in Sweden. In 2009, she earned a Ph.D in art history from Umeå University. In 2018, she was awarded the August Prize for Ædnan. She lives in Stockholm, Sweden.