She has been described as an author who fights darkness with polar lights. The award winning poet, journalist and translator Cecilia Hansson recently published her second novel, Snö och potatis (2021). A road trip through Tornedalen that is also a journey through the memories of adolescence and of the forces that shape a human life. It is a story about the longing for change, a longing which is also a loss, of knowing that “it can never be like it once was”.

Snö och potatis is a diary-like novel that explores the fundamental questions of how you become who you are today: What shaped me? What do I pass on to others, to my children? How do I shape another person’s life? Hansson is a daughter but also a mother to a daughter of her own.

In the book Hansson asks the question “what defines me as a person. Where does that begin? What is the point I will have to define myself against for the rest of my life?” Her language has been described as equally parts anxiety inducing and romantic. 

In her previous novel Au pair (2019) Hansson also explored the theme of memory and travel. This time as a young person in Europe, sojourning in Vienna, the place where everything, or perhaps nothing, happened. The book has been praised for its unconventional form- a fluid narrative oscillating between poetry and prose. But also for its honesty and humour.

Her collections of poetry have also gained considerable attention. Not least for her ability to free the female sex organ from the tropes of darkness and pornography that society insists on. Warm and intimate, her poetry evokes the sensation of skin on skin. 

Her poems also free the experience of female adolescence from the male gaze. Instead of being passive and blushing, Hansson gives voice to the feelings of young desire, in all its frustration and confusion. Hansson’s language has been described as compressed and glistening, like polished gemstones.

Here she will be in conversation with Jenny Aschenbrenner, literary critic and journalist who has worked for a range of publications and now reviews novels and feminist literature for Svenska Dagbladet.

Språk: Swedish
Saturday 26 March 14.00
Uppsala Stadsteater