by Birgitta Trotzig (Author), Saskia Vogel (Translator), Hanne Orstavik (Afterword by)

Long-awaited rediscovery of visionary Swedish writer Birgitta Trotzig and her mythic, modernist classic, Queen

Birgitta Trotzig's 1964 novella is the story of a girl named Judit who is stubborn and singular, distant and unyielding. She has a love of lilies. She is called Queen. Her entire world exists within Bäck, a village in the south of Sweden so named because a brook bends through it. At the age of nine, Judit's mother falls ill during childbirth and passes Judit the strong little body of her brother Viktor. A sharp gleam springs forth from Viktor's pale-blue infant eyes, and the two are bonded for life. Viktor and Judit, along with their wordless brother Albert (one who prefers the warm silence of animals), form a precarious family. In dark and mystical waves of language, Judit's inner life is awakened to the reader. She has her secrets. The Queen prizes her alias like a precious gemstone; she dreams one day that the master gardener at Trolle Ljungby Castle will select her very own flower bulbs for planting; and she holds suspicions like hot stones to her heart. When Viktor decides to emigrate to the United States, the ground beneath Judit's feet forever shifts.

Author Biography

Birgitta Trotzig (1929-2011) was one of the 20th century's most important Scandinavian voices. She grew up in Gothenburg and later in Kristianstad. From 1954 she lived with her family, first in Italy, then in France, and it was during this period that Birgitta Trotzig converted to Catholicism. Her years abroad put her in closer contact with European modernism and with the resistance to the Algerian War. On her return to Sweden, she began working as a critic and writing her debut, Ur de älskandes liv. She published the successful prose poetry collections Bilder (1954), Ett landskap (1959), and En berättelse från kusten (1961). Her novella Sveket (1966) is characterized by a search for the living word in a time of darkness. Her cultural criticism expresses a political commitment and a demand for the right to create without being tied down to ideologies, as well as the notion of an artistic language as a possible counter-language to the language of power, all evident in her essay collection Jaget och världen. Employing a language full of legend and paeans, Birgitta Trotzig lends a voice to the vulnerable and the tormented. She was elected to the Swedish Academy in 1993.

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