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Linnea Axelsson is a Sámi-Swedish writer, born in the province of North Bothnia in Sweden. In 2009, she earned a PhD in Art History from Umeå University. More about this author >
Saskia Vogel is an author and translator from Los Angeles, now living in Berlin. She was awarded the Berlin Senate grant for non-German literature and two English PEN Translates Awards, and was a PEN Translation Prize finalist. More about this author >
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Translated from the Swedish
From the publisher:
In Northern Sámi, the word Ædnan means the land, the earth, and my mother. The tale begins in the 1910s, as Ristin and her family migrate their herd of reindeer to summer grounds. Along the way, forced to separate due to the newly formed border between Sweden and Norway, Ristin loses one of her sons in the aftermath of an accident, a grief that will ripple across the rest of the book. In the wake of this tragedy, Ristin struggles to manage what’s left of her family and her community.
In the 1970s, Lise, as part of a new generation of Sámi grappling with questions of identity and inheritance, reflects on her traumatic childhood, when she was forced to leave her parents and was placed in a Nomad School to be stripped of the language of her ancestors. Finally, in the 2010s we meet Lise’s daughter, Sandra, an embodiment of Indigenous resilience, an activist fighting for reparations in a highly publicized land rights trial, in a time when the Sámi language is all but lost.
Weaving together the voices of half a dozen characters, from elders to young people unsure of their heritage, Axelsson has created a moving family saga around the consequences of colonial settlement.
Ædnan is a layered translation from the Swedish—a resonant telling of Sámi-speaking Indigenous peoples’ lost language and migrant history, revealed by Saskia Vogel’s inspired English rendering. A dotted line of narrative—alternating between text and white space—mirrors the separations, silences, and absences that mark a family’s quest for selfhood, collective memory, and place. Lyrical and plainspoken, polyphonic and propulsive, Linnea Axelsson’s novel-in-verse reframes colonial discourse and redefines the epic form.
