Each year, the Albert Bonnier Scholarship Foundation awards eight scholarships to support, encourage, and celebrate authors writing in Swedish. These scholarships are distributed across the following categories: fiction writers, poets, cultural journalists, translators, illustrators/designers, and non-fiction writers.

Both Anders Rydell and Andrzej Tichý are among this year’s recipients. Tichý, who released his critically acclaimed Book of Events in February, is one of the recipients in the fiction category. Rydell, whose latest work is the highly praised Stolen Music, is one of two recipients in the non-fiction category.

Andrzej Tichý’s critically acclaimed Book of Events has held the No. 1 spot on Dagens Nyheter’s prestigious critics’ list for two weeks in a row, which marks the book’s 6th consecutive week on the list.

Dagens Nyheter is one of Sweden’s biggest and most influential daily newspapers, and has previously given the book the following praise: “It is fantastically rich. Triumphant. /…/ Andrzej Tichý’s new novel is a dark and majestic manifesto about our moment on Earth.”

“This time, he hasn’t written a perfect novel. Book of Events is something much better than that.” – Göteborgs-Posten

A dizzying mosaic novel about power, powerlessness, and the power of imagination. On a playground in Malmö, a girl takes her own life with pills she stole from her mother. A young man discovers her but doesn’t seek any help, as he doesn’t want to involve the authorities. A few days later he is found, knocked out in a stairwell, by a former radical writer down on his luck who lets him sleep off the high on his couch. Somehow, their lives are connected by a number of people and events, scattered in time and space. A psychedelic dance of death, in which sharp contemporary realism is mixed with lively satire.

Andrzej Tichý (b. 1978) was born in Prague to a Polish mother and a Czech father and has lived in Sweden since 1981. He is the author of five novels, a story collection and a wide range of nonfiction and criticism. Tichý has received critical acclaim for his work, and is widely recognized as one of the most important novelists of his generation.

The author of Wretchedness and Purity is awarded the Ivar Lo-Johansson’s personal prize, one of Sweden’s most prestigious literary prizes. The award has previously been awarded to Per Olov Enquist, Birgitta Trotzig, Kerstin Thorvall and Kerstin Ekman, amongst others.

The jury’s motivation is as follows: “With literary sharpness and dark humor he depicts the experiences of migration.” The jury also highlights his ability to pin down the loneliness of those who are subjected to class oppression.