We would like to congratulate Steve Sem-Sandberg whose much-praised novel De fattiga i Lodz (The Destitutes of Lodz) last night won the August Prize, awarded by the Swedish Booksellers Association. The jury's motivation was as follows:

With this collective novel, Steve Sem-Sandberg attends to a specific chapter in the annals of World War II: the Jewish ghetto in the Polish city of Lodz west of Warsaw, its origin, organisation and heartbreaking conditions under Nazi supervision. It is a story that is told after all the tears have dried, depicted in an almost dry and unsentimental style, a balancing act between fact and fiction that with a basis in the (authentic) Ghetto Chronicles 1941-44, portrays a series of individual destinies with strong integrity, also when they waver or fail.

Congratulations, Steve!