Literature

Since 1990s, Nordic crime fiction has been a significant sub-genre within the global genre of crime fiction. Usually characterised by social realism, gloomy locations and morose detectives, crime novels and TV series from across the Nordic region provide puzzling mysteries and thrilling stories that use the crime plot to investigate the state of justice, equality, vulnerability and current debates specific to the Nordic welfare societies. The genre includes modern TV classics such as the Danish Forbrydelsen (The Killing, 2007-2012), the Danish/Swedish co-production Bron/Broen (The Bridge, 2011-2018) and global bestsellers by the Norwegian Jo Nesbø and the Swede Stieg Larsson, but it also includes dark and critical images of the underbelly of the Nordic states, which extend further back in history, even to literary works from the nineteenth century.

Few have been there and yet everyone has some image of what the Arctic is. For most people, it conjures up images of an extreme environment, white and cold. Or more recently, one of giant ice floes melting away as the impacts of climate change are felt twice as fast near the poles as anywhere else. Although these images may be grounded in some truth, this view simplifies and reduces the complexities and richness of the Arctic, not just in terms of physical landscapes but also in terms of the people(s) living there, its history and its future.

As elsewhere, modernism was a movement concerning the profound questioning of traditional values, modes of speaking and interpretations of subjectivity. A mass of Nordic literature was produced that could be said to be modernist, from Norwegian Knut Hamsun’s innovative novels in the 1890s, to the influential high Swedish modernism in poetry led by Erik Lindegren and Karl Vennberg, to stream-of-consciousness prose by Icelandic Svava Jakobsdóttir, to name but a few.

Writing in a neo-realist style, Danish author Anders Bodelsen often portrays everyday people in contemporary welfare society, such as in his breakthrough crime thriller, Think of a Number.

Despite it not being the most popular genre within the Nordic countries, science fiction writers have produced a range of literature. These span from satirical predictions about humankind’s degeneration in Sam Lundwall’s Ace-books in Sweden in 1970s, to Aila Johanna Sinisalo’s award-winning portrayal of gender issues in Ennen päivänlaskua ei voi in Finland (2000), to Andri Snær Magnason’s Love Sta, a fusion of Monty-Python 'sand that of Douglas Adams' style. Audiences are sufficient to warrant the production of fanzines in nearly all the Nordic countries as well as other activities.