Elisabeth Åsbrink is awarded the Matilde Serao Award

Author, journalist, and playwright Elisabeth Åsbrink has been awarded the prestigious Italian The Matilde Serao Award, named after Matilde Serao, co-founder of the newspaper Il Mattino.

The prize is awarded to Åsbrink for her:

“literary and human sensitivity as a chronicler of her time, for the high quality of her journalistic reporting, for the sharpness with which she combines fiction and history, and for her passionate and creative portrayal of a contemporary world where, as she herself writes, ‘time does not quite go as planned'”.

In her works, Elisabeth Åsbrink masterfully combines historical awareness with personal experience. In Abandonment, she draws inspiration from her family history, told through three generations of women, to paint a historical panorama.

With a sharp and at times chilling gaze, in a kaleidoscope of facts and micro-descriptions, she recounts the decisive turning points in 1947, a critical year that laid the foundation for our contemporary world, with all its tensions.

In My Big Beautiful Hatred, a literary biography of the 19th-century author Victoria Benedictsson, Elisabeth Åsbrink reconstructs the life story of one of Sweden’s most important narrative voices of the 19th century. By recreating Benedictsson’s artistic and personal struggles at a time when contemporary male writers such as August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen were active, Elisabeth Åsbrink depicts the difficulties and pain of being a female writer and living in Scandinavia.

For her significant contribution to journalism and literary writing, Elisabeth Åsbrink has previously been awarded several prestigious awards, including the August Prize for best non-fiction book in 2012, the Ryszard Kapuściński Prize in 2014, and the Letterstedt Prize for Writers from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 2017.

By awarding Elisabeth Åsbrink the eighth edition of the Matilde Serao Award, the committee intends to honor a highly evocative expressiveness that, across time and space, can be compared to that of a great writer such as Matilde Serao herself.

Previous winners include Jhumpa Lahiri, Melania G. Mazzucco, and Azar Nafisi.