Tag: Selma Lagerlöf

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Announcing our Latest Title: A Kaleidoscope of Stories 

Selma Lagerlöf’s A Kaleidoscope of Stories (Norvik Press, July 2025)

‘Osceola’ by George Catlin (1838)

Selma Lagerlöf’s vivid recollection of discovering the heady delights of the adventure story Oseola (sometimes known as Osceola) as a child is taken from ‘Two Prophecies’, one of the autobiographical texts in this volume. It seems a fitting way to open this blogpost about the latest addition to our ‘Lagerlöf in English’ series, which turns the spotlight on the power of short stories.  The volume contains a carefully chosen selection of Lagerlöf’s most important stories covering a range of themes, genres and periods of her career, translated by our prize-winning trio of Lagerlöf translators, Linda Schenck, Peter Graves and Sarah Death. After each story they also provide explanatory notes where appropriate.

Långserud, Värmland (Martin Edström/imagebank.sweden.se)

Midsummer folk dance, Öland (Bernt Fransson)

Lucca, Church of St. John and St. Reparata, 4th Century (Syrio)

Key autobiographical pieces, morality tales both dark and light, legends from several lands and folklore-inspired narratives combine to reveal the breadth and stylistic range of Lagerlöf’s storytelling skills. This is a collection of interest to general readers but also a useful teaching tool for Swedish and comparative literature courses around the world. The volume includes a comprehensive and accessible introduction by Lagerlöf specialist Bjarne Thorup 
Thomsen (University of Edinburgh). The nine stories have been arranged into three thematic sections: Women, Work and Writing; Landscapes, Families and ‘Others’; Epochs, Societies and Values.

As our specialist scholar writes in his introduction, the collection has been designed to offer the reader a multifaceted mixture of stories. The selected narratives showcase different times, places, atmospheres, styles and genre modes. Some stories are obvious instances of prose fiction, while others are balanced somewhere between fictional and factual writing. With the nine narratives listed chronologically according to their dates of first publication, the content of the volume is as follows (annotations by Bjarne Thorup Thomsen):

‘Mamsell Fredrika’ / ‘Miss Fredrika’ – an imaginative and extravagantly expressed tribute to a female trailblazer in Swedish literature, centred, like many of Lagerlöf’s stories, around Christmas.

‘De fågelfrie’ / ‘The Outlaws’ – a narrative, steeped in nature mysticism and fin-de-siècle-feel, about clashes, but also fluid boundaries, between pagan and Christian mindsets in medieval times, fuelled by the descriptive energy that Lagerlöf attributed to her writing at the time.

‘Gudsfreden’ / ‘God’s Peace at Christmas’ – an enquiry into a close encounter, with elements of crime, between human and animal, and Lagerlöf’s first depiction of the Ingmarssons, the powerful family of peasants that would take centre stage in Jerusalem.

‘Spelmannen’ / ‘The Fiddler’ – a story, both playful and uncanny, about a self-assured musician and the shadows of abandoned family, set during a Nordic summer night in a landscape that is both attraction and trap.

‘Silvergruvan’ / ‘The Silver Mine’ – a nation-orientated narrative about the homeland’s real riches, anticipating some of the major themes in Nils Holgersson. 

‘Två spådomar’ / ‘Two Prophecies’ – a biographical sketch in six life moments, infused with motifs of deciphering, reading and writing, about Lagerlöf’s route to becoming an author, published at a time when her national, and indeed international, fame was growing fast.

‘Bortbytingen’ / ‘The Changeling’ – a suspense-filled story about unexpected contact and strange parallels between a human and an ‘alien’ sphere, featuring an unconventional and resourceful heroine.

‘Den heliga bilden i Lucca’ / ‘The Sacred Image in Lucca’ – a miraculous legend and picaresque travel adventure played out in Italy, foregrounding poor but hopeful working-class characters and told in a lucid style and light-hearted tone.

‘Dimman’ / ‘The Mist’ – a modern parable with a punishing ending, published in the context of the First World War and critiquing attitudes, including artistic ones, to the reality of global conflict and suffering.

We enthusiastically echo Bjarne’s assessment that Lagerlöf’s rich corpus of short stories and related forms of short prose deserves renewed attention – and up-to-date translations. These are the first retranslations of the texts in our anthology for over a century. We are sure that all anglophone readers, from committed Selma followers to those discovering her work for the first time, will fall under the spell of her storytelling in this varied volume.

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Women in Translation Month: Enduring storytellers and fresh talent. #WITMonth

Norvik Press’s credentials in translating and publishing work by women writers remain impressive. In 2025, for example, we are publishing three titles by women writers, and four out of our five translators for those titles are women, too. 

Our latest blog looks at two of our regular favourites – a Swedish and a Norwegian author, each with a peerless storytelling pedigree – and introduces a modern-day writer from Greenland whose stories paint a startling picture of her country.

Selma Lagerlöf

Selma Lagerlöf’s youthful work Gösta Berlings saga was the jumping-off point for an extraordinary career. this largely home-schooled young trainee teacher decided to submit some chapters to a writing competition in Stockholm – and won! She then expanded those chapters into to a novel, which was published in 1891. It, and many of the novels that followed it, are whirlwinds of betrayal, love, human weakness and redemption.

Selma Lagerlöf (1858-1940)

The majority of the fast-moving romantic adventures are set around the shores of a lake in the dramatic north-westerly landscapes of Lagerlöf’s native province, Värmland. 

Värmland. Photograph: Martin Edström

The author’s early works completely confounded the literary establishment of the time, but like so much of Lagerlöf’s masterly storytelling they have remained enduringly popular not only within Sweden but around the world. The prime example is her much-loved adventure tale Nils Holgersson’s Wonderful Journey through Sweden, about a boy punished for laziness by an elf who shrinks his size. The boy is then carried the length and breadth of the land on the back of a goose, learning precious life lessons by becoming part of the flock. 

Norvik Press’s long-running ‘Lagerlöf in English’ series spans the full range of Lagerlöf’s work, from her action-packed Löwensköld Ring series to her multi-faceted trio of Mårbacka ‘memoirs’ via many standalone titles such as the touching and melancholy Emperor of Portugallia, and Banished, with its harrowing First World War scenes and ultimately uplifting pacifist message.

Steve Sem-Sandberg, winner of the Selma Lagerlöf Literature Prize 2024 awarded this month, spoke admiringly of her narrative instincts and her powers of imagination.  Lagerlöf, he said, possessed a unique ability to combine the time-bound and the timeless, to take things and people she had herself experienced and transform them. Norvik’s three translators – Sarah Death, Peter Graves and Linda Schenck – can only concur. They take delight in translating Selma’s work and are currently enjoyably engaged on their first team project, an anthology of her short stories. This newest addition to the ‘Lagerlöf in English’ series will be published next year under the title A Kaleidoscope of Stories.

Amalie Skram

Amalie Skram (1846-1905)

This adventurous nineteenth-century Norwegian writer is nowadays mostly known – and still widely read – for her novels about the unenviable fates of young women in a society which expects them to be modest and chaste, and brings them up to be obedient wives and devoted mothers. Norvik Press has previously published three of these, translated by the talented American translating team of Katherine Hanson and Judith Messick.

In Betrayed, the child-like Aurora embarks on marriage – and a long sea voyage – with her worldly-wise new husband as ship’s captain, only to discover with horror that he has had a number of sexual encounters; the discovery both repels and fascinates her, and drives her to torment him until both become victims of a repressive social system. Fru Inés tells the story of a woman married to a callous and profligate husband, who longs to experience the sexual ecstasy she has never known. The novel is set in Constantinople, a city the author knew well, and the sights, sounds and smells of the teeming metropolis blend with the growing anguish of Inés to reach a dreadful climax. The heroine of Lucie, on the other hand, is a girl from the other side of the tracks, a dancing girl and mistress of a respectable civil servant, Theodor Gerner; he decides to redeem her by marrying her, only to destroy her by his rigid expectations of acceptable behaviour.

Our new venture is a translation of the work which was originally considered Amalie Skram’s crowning achievement, the four-volume series The People of Hellemyr. The novels have often been compared to Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series; they are set in and around Skram’s native Bergen, and the narrow alleys and bustling harbour of the old port are central to the action.

Bergen harbour, late 19th century. Photograph: Bergen fotoarkiv

The first two volumes, in Janet Garton’s translation, will be published in 2025. Sjur Gabriel follows the struggle for existence of a desperately poor farming family, scraping a living from the stony soil, until the arrival of a golden child seems to offer a faint hope of a richer life. Two Friends follows the adventures of their grandson Sivert, who becomes a sailor and travels to Jamaica; he is a strong and willing lad who seems to have every chance of getting on in life, but he cannot flee from the fatal weakness of character which he has inherited.

Sörine Steenholdt

In a new departure for Norvik Press, we are excited to announce that we will also be publishing a Greenlandic book in 2025. Sørine Steenholdt was born in Paamiut in southern Greenland in 1986, and in 2015 her debut book, a short story and poetry collection called Zombiet Nunaat (Zombieland), was published.

Sörine Steenholdt (b. 1986). Photograph: Ulannaq Ingemann

All the texts can be seen as allegories that critique Greenlandic society. Some condemn the older generation of Greenlanders who fell into alcohol abuse and neglected their children, whilst others express the younger generation’s refusal to be represented as subservient to Denmark. While alcoholism has decreased, and sovereignty has been claimed, the memories of the suffering and betrayal of the older generation remain. Steenholdt’s stories emphasise the flaws of contemporary Greenland such as poor journalism, untrustworthy leadership, ineffective social institutions and a dysfunctional legal system, making her Greenland a ‘Zombieland’ – a place where no-one is in control.

Zombieland, cover of the original Greenlandic edition

The book was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature prize on first publication, and Norvik Press has been awarded a PEN translation grant for this translation. It will be translated from Danish by the well-known literary translator Charlotte Barslund.

Other Norvik Press translations of women writers:

Inga Ābele: The Year the River Froze Twice (translated by Christopher Moseley)

Victoria Benedictsson: Money (translated by Sarah Death)

Karin Boye: Crisis (translated by Amanda Doxtater) 

Fredrika Bremer: The Colonel’s Family (translated by Sarah Death)

Suzanne Brøgger: A Fighting Pig’s Too Tough to Eat (and Other Prose Texts) (translated by Marina Allemano) 

Camilla Collett: The District Governor’s Daughters (translated by Kirsten Seaver)

Kerstin Ekman: Witches’ Rings (translated by Linda Schenck), The Spring (translated by Linda Schenck), The Angel House (translated by Sarah Death), City of Light (translated by Linda Schenck), Childhood (translated by Rochelle Wright).

Janet Garton (ed.): Contemporary Norwegian Women’s Writing

Svava Jakobsdóttir: Gunnlöth’s Tale (translated by Oliver Watts)

Viivi Luik: The Beauty of History (translated by Hildi Hawkins)

Hagar Olsson: Chitambo (translated by Sarah Death) 

Hanne Marie Svendsen: Under the Sun (translated by Marina Allemano)

Kirsten Thorup: The God of Chance (translated by Janet Garton)

Helene Uri: Honey Tongues (translated by Kari Dickson)

Elin Wägner: Penwoman (translated by Sarah Death)

Dorrit Willumsen: Bang: A Novel About the Danish Writer (translated by Marina Allemano)

To order the Norvik Press books highlighted in this blog, please follow the green hyperlinks or request the titles you would like at your favourite bookshop.

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The Lagerlöf in English series – updates

In June 2011, Norvik Press published Lord Arne’s Silver, The Phantom Carriage and The Löwensköld Ring, three short novels by the world-renowned author Selma Lagerlöf. It was the start of an exciting and, for us, very gratifying project – the Lagerlöf in English Series – which has turned into twelve books so far. The translations are done by Linda Schenck, Peter Graves and Sarah Death, all experienced and prize-winning translators from Swedish to English. In addition to the substantial job of translating a Nobel Prize winner, Schenck, Graves and Death have also contributed with their own translators’ afterwords in their respective translations. These chapters make for an intriguing read about different aspects of translating each particular book and give in-depth information about Lagerlöf’s work. Furthermore, each book is introduced by an exciting and informative preface written by the late Helena Forsås-Scott, the pioneering mind behind the series.

The series now comprises 13 titles, most recently Memoirs of a Child (volume II of the Mårbacka trilogy), published in 2022.

You can read more about all of the titles in our Series brochure.

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A summer of Lagerlöf – highlights

For those who couldn’t join the Anglo-Swedish Society’s literary salon celebrating the superb Selma last week, all the readings and discussion were recorded and are now available to enjoy here: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=anglo-swedish+society

You can also read through our live-tweeting from the event on our Twitter feed here: https://twitter.com/norvikpress (posts dated 4 August). If you are now looking to fill a Lagerlöf-shaped hole in your life, we would suggest Lord Arne’s Silver, translated by Sarah Death. This novella makes a lasting impression on its readers and is best read in company and full sunlight. An economical and haunting tale of robbery and retribution, it can be inhaled in a single, nerve-shredding sitting but remains in the mind for a long time afterwards.

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A summer of Lagerlöf – continued

We have some more pre-reading for you this week, ahead of the Anglo-Swedish Society’s Selma Lagerlöf – A Wonderful Adventure event and Women in Translation Month (#WITMonth).

Part of our Lagerlöf in English series and translated by Linda Schenck, Banished examines what happens to an individual rejected by society, and what happens to a society that realises – too late – that the living are more important than the dead, and that it is suffering a crisis of values and priorities. What does war do to us and to our outlook on the world?

Lagerlöf struggled with these issues throughout World War I and experienced a mental block in writing about them. Then she found an opening and produced a thought-provoking tale of love, death and survival that grapples with moral dilemmas as relevant today as they were a century ago.

An extract of Banished is available to read here, which covers some unexpected guests – thought-provoking preparatory reading if you are Zooming in to the Anglo-Swedish Society’s salon next week, and eerily resonant of these times of post-travel quarantine.

If this has made you curious to add the complete book to your summer reading tower, you can order it at all good bookstores.

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A summer of Lagerlöf

Ahead of the Anglo-Swedish Society’s event celebrating Selma Lagerlöf – A Wonderful Adventure and Women in Translation Month (#WITMonth) in August, we are highlighting our library of Lagerlöf in English.

Anna Svärd is Lagerlöf’s last work of fiction and the final volume in her Löwensköld Trilogy. First published in Swedish in 1928 and translated for Norvik Press by Linda Schenck, it completes the family cycle of the preceding two volumes, The Löwensköld Ring and Charlotte Löwensköld, and combines a compelling account of women’s struggle towards agency with a chilling – and unexpected – denouement.

They laughed loud and long, each one louder than the
next, though at the same time they were embarrassed. It was,
of course, not proper to laugh when the head of the family
and household had been duped. They were decent, well-bred
women and they definitely disapproved of themselves. But
their laughter quite simply came from natural human depths,
and could not be restrained without risk of suffocation.

We have made an extract from Anna Svärd newly available here. This scene is a joy for all: it recounts a practical joke which is particularly fitting for #WITMonth, and may raise a smile in these challenging times. It will also be particularly useful pre-reading for those planning to join the Anglo-Swedish Society’s readings of Lagerlöf’s work later this summer, for which you can order copies of all the texts in our Lagerlöf in English series from your friendly local bookshop.

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Lagerlöf and public health education

This week we’re highlighting two translations from our Lagerlöf in English series: Nils Holgersson’s Wonderful Journey through Sweden (1906-07), available here; and The Phantom Carriage (1912), available here, both translated by Peter Graves.

This blogpost is adapted from a longer essay by one of our directors, Claire Thomson. If you read Swedish, you can download it for free here.

As we begin to understand Covid-19, this dreadful new disease afflicting humankind, there is some comfort to be found in the thought that within the last century, great leaps were made in the treatment and control of another scourge: tuberculosis. In Sweden alone, half a million people died of tuberculosis between 1900 and 1950. In 1904, the Swedish National Association Against Tuberculosis (Nationalföreningen mot Tuberkulos) was established to coordinate public health education about the disease. One of the association’s founders, alongside Crown Prince Gustav, was the author Selma Lagerlöf.

In its first few decades, a key activity for the Association was to organise peripatetic lectures and film and slide shows educating Swedes about hygiene and other preventative measures against tuberculosis. Money was raised for research and education through the sale of stamps and the majblomma flower pin. But a subtler means of raising awareness was Lagerlöf’s writing; she was encouraged by the Association to write the novella The Phantom Carriage (Körkarlen, 1912), a ghost story which lays bare the sickness, poverty and misery engendered by tuberculosis. The novella was adapted for the silver screen in 1920-21 by the great Swedish director and actor Victor Sjöström. A blockbuster of its day, it was one of the first films to use double exposure, and inspired the young Ingmar Bergman to take up filmmaking.

Feature films and literature can, of course, indirectly promote public health messages. But in the days before television and social media, purpose-made short films were widely used in public information campaigns. In 1952, twelve years after her death, Lagerlöf’s writing again played a role in educating the Swedish populace about the fight against tuberculosis. By this time, half a century of research had resulted in effective prevention and treatment, and Sweden had been one of the countries to pioneer a nation-wide screening and vaccination programme in the 1940s (including the use of miniature x-ray machines in buses). The dramatist Martin Söderhjelm was commissioned by the National Association Against Tuberculosis to make a short film reminding Swedes of the work of the Association, encouraging them to participate in medical screening programmes, and looking to the future. The sixteen-minute film, shown in cinemas around the country in autumn 1952, was Medan det ännu är tid: ‘While there’s still time’.

In order to engage its audience, Medan det ännu är tid opens with a tale that every Swedish cinema-goer would remember from their school days: an episode from Lagerlöf’s Nils Holgersson. Chapter XLIV of the epic novel fills in the back-story of two recurring characters, Åsa the goose-girl and her little brother Mats, and the film devotes its first five minutes to the sad fate of these fictional children. Åsa and Mats are from a poor Småland family. Their siblings and mother are infected by a traveller and die one by one, and their father flees. The orphaned Åsa and Mats attend a lecture explaining the symptoms, prevention and treatment of tuberculosis, and they realize that their family died of the disease, not of the sick traveller’s curse. Åsa and Mats embark on their own journey through Sweden to find their father, navigating forests, towns and frozen lakes (see below), and along the way they tell the people they encounter about the need for good hygiene in combating the spread of tuberculosis. The film thus stages the historical phenomenon of travelling public health lecturers, an authentic detail already embedded in the novel by an author who was herself a founding member of the National Association Against Tuberculosis. But in typical Lagerlöf style, public health education is also framed in Nils Holgersson as a kind of mythical or folktale-style wandering across the national map, undertaken by the good citizens Åsa and Mats.

Both in Lagerlöf’s novel and Söderhjelm’s film, the fight against tuberculosis thus emerges as a collective undertaking for Swedish society, a battle that is fought not only by scientists and medics, but by ordinary people doing simple, everyday things – like washing their hands.

* * *

For Peter Graves’ translation of Nils Holgersson’s Wonderful Journey through Sweden, Norvik Press commissioned original illustrations from the illustrator Bea Bonafini. Bea comments here on her illustration for chapter XXV, which depicts a dramatic episode in Åsa and Mats’ trek through Sweden:

Possibly my favourite image, I chose this tragic moment for its visual power, as well as for how poignantly Lagerlöf depicts the race for survival of the brother and sister. I imagined the aerial view of the running children, seen from the perspective of the gander and the boy as they direct the children out of the maze of cracking ice. The image evokes the precarious balance between life and death as the children try to avoid running into dead ends while making their way across. It is the first inverted image I use, where the picture of the iced lake fills a negative space, causing an initial sense of disorientation appropriate to the nature of the image.

‘The Ice Breaks Up’, illustration by Bea Bonafini for Nils Holgersson’s Wonderful Journey through Sweden
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Memories of Mårbacka

There are times over the past twelve weeks or so when our semi-isolated living situation has made us feel we’ve been transported back to an earlier age. Living in a rural area in particular, and seeing the busy – if socially distanced – local community interactions and the empty roads, you can almost feel as if you’re a resident of Mrs Gaskell’s Cranford. Or indeed of Selma Lagerlöf’s Mårbacka, where families struggle, to be sure, and life can be physically and mentally tough, but the pace of things is largely determined by the slowly changing seasons and the length of time it takes to get anywhere on foot, or in a horse and gig along the winding, hilly roads round the lakes of Värmland province.

In the lockdown months we’ve all come to appreciate the value of a full larder, and in that we have much in common with the housekeeper at Mårbacka farm, who prides herself on a full storehouse to keep the large household going. Read our evocative extract here.

Tina Stafrén/imagebank.sweden.se

Explore the world of Selma Lagerlöf not only in Mårbacka but through our whole series ‘Lagerlöf in English’, translated by Peter Graves, Linda Schenck and Sarah Death. This great Swedish storyteller brings you tales of everything from love in sickness and in health, via romance and betrayal, hauntings and untimely deaths, salty sea air and valiant derring-do, to family life with its fractious and funny moments and its small delights.

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Påskekrim

Scandinavia – a cold, bleak place with cold, bleak weather and cold, bleak people. A place to escape from. As well as the perfect setting for gruesome crimes. And where better to capture this foul ambience than in a hair-raising page-turner? Nordic noir has been a welcome escape route for many Scandinavians over the decades. Crime fiction makes up a large percentage of the total sales in Scandinavia and often tops the best-seller lists.

And once a year crime fiction turns into an elevated form of its own – påskekrim. It is something particularly Norwegian and a very specific type of crime fiction, namely the crime fiction read during Easter – påske – holidays. These crime novels are often published in order to reach the shelves just before the holidays, and they often tell stories set at Easter time. Påskekrim is a long-standing tradition for Norwegians when they head for their mountain cabins. Then they pack their little ryggsekks full of påske essentials, such as oranges, kvikk lunsjes, skis and ski poles, traditional board games and – most importantly – crime novels. Why? In order to scare themselves properly up there in the lonely mountains? The wind howls through the cracks of their old-style, wooden cabins which are only dimly lit by candlelight and an open fire, and each time any of them need to use the loo they have to risk death (by nature or at the hands of the violent murderers they have just read about) by staggering out into the nothingness to try to feel their way to the utedo. This life is highly appealing to Norwegians. They think it is the quintessential representation of hygge, and påskekrim plays a crucial part. 

The reason why the term påskekrim exists is because of a specific crime novel published in 1923: Bergenstoget plyndret i natt! The translation of the title reads ‘The Train to Bergen robbed last night’. It takes place around Easter time and was published at Easter. It was written by two young, aspiring authors who were later to become some of Norway’s best known writers, Nordahl Grieg and Nils Lie. Grieg’s brother, Harald Grieg, was the head of Norway’s biggest publishing house, Gyldendal. He decided to run a campaign to promote the novel on the front pages of all the important newspapers in the country. So the public got quite a shock when they woke up to the alarming headline of the book title – with only a small, almost invisible indication underneath that it was an advert!

So whether you are going all-out Scandi and heading for the mountains, or prefer to stay at home tucked underneath a blanket, Easter time is the perfect time to escape into the mysterious bleak world of crime fiction.

Norvik Press crime novels

Murder in the Dark sports a winning combination of engaging crime narrative and cool, unsentimental appraisal of Scandinavian society (as seen through the eyes of its shabby, unconventional anti-hero). There are elements of the book which now seem quite as relevant as when they were written, and like all the most accomplished writing in the Nordic Noir field, there is an acute and well-observed sense of place throughout the novel. The descriptions of Copenhagen channel the poetic sensibility which is the author’s own: “Copenhagen is at its most beautiful when seen out of a taxi at midnight, right at that magical moment when one day dies and another is born, and the printing presses are buzzing with the morning newspapers”.

Two British environmental activists are discovered dead amongst the whale corpses after a whale-kill in Tórshavn. The detective Hannis Martinsson is asked to investigate by a representative of the organisation Guardians of the Sea – who shortly afterwards is killed when his private plane crashes. Suspicion falls on Faroese hunters, angry at persistent interference in their traditional whale hunt; but the investigation leads Martinsson to a much larger group of international vested interests, and the discovery of a plot which could devastate the whole country.

And for a different kind of whodunnit, why not try

The Löwensköld Ring is the first volume of a trilogy originally published between 1925 and 1928. In addition to being a disturbing saga of revenge from beyond the grave, it is a tale of courageous, persistent women, with interesting narrative twists and a permeating sense of ambiguity. The potent ring of the title brings suffering and violent death in its wake and its spell continues from one generation to the next, as well as into the two subsequent novels in the trilogy: Charlotte Löwensköld and Anna Swärd. The Löwensköld trilogy was her last work of pure fiction, and is now considered a masterpiece.

Lastly, a future translation to look forward to

Written by Kristin Lorentsen

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Ten Lagerlöf masterpieces for £100

Women in Translation Month is almost over, but we couldn’t let it pass without celebrating the woman whose shadow looms large over our catalogue, and the women and men who have translated her work: Selma Lagerlöf.

For a limited time only, we’re offering ten Lagerlöf masterpieces for £100. Read on for more details…

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To date, Norvik Press has published ten of Lagerlöf’s works in English translation [click here to download the series leaflet]:

A Manor House Tale: a psychological novella and a folk tale in which two young and damaged people redeem each other.

Banished: infused with the visceral horrors of the First World War, Banished is a tale of love, loneliness, and the extremes of human morality. Read an extract here.

The Emperor of Portugallia: A compelling exploration of father-daughter relationships and of madness.

The Phantom Carriage: an atmospheric ghost story and a cautionary tale of the effects of tuberculosis and alcoholism, famously adapted to film by the great Swedish director Victor Sjöström.

Lord Arne’s Silver: from a 16th-century killing unfolds a tale of retribution, love and betrayal.

Mårbacka: part memoir, part mischievous satire set on Lagerlöf’s childhood estate. Read an extract from Mårbacka in English here.

The Löwensköld Trilogy: Lagerlöf’s last work of fiction, the trilogy follows several generations of a cursed family and explores destiny, evil, motherhood, and many other themes along the way. The trilogy consists of three volumes:  The Löwensköld Ring, Charlotte Löwensköld, and Anna Svärd.

The internationally beloved tale of a boy and his goose, Nils Holgersson’s Wonderful Journey through Sweden, Volume 1 and Volume 2 (Nils Holgersson is also available in a single-volume hardback collector’s edition).

Purchased individually, all eleven paperbacks (including the two paperback volumes of Nils Holgersson) cost a total of £135 (plus P&P). Until 14 September 2018, we are offering a limited number of complete sets of eleven paperbacks at the discounted price of £100 (plus P&P). This special price is only available on orders placed directly with Norvik Press, not through book stores or online. Please email norvik.press@ucl.ac.uk to place your order. First come, first served – available only while stocks last!

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