Kerstin Ekman is primarily known as a novelist, but she has occasionally turned to free verse, especially when the subject is autobiographical. In 1993-1994, Swedish TV 1 conducted a series of talks with prominent writers under the rubric 'Seven Boys and Seven Girls'. In place of an ordinary interview, Kerstin Ekman read aloud Barndom (Childhood). The poem, which was published for the first time in Swedish Book Review in 1995, appears here with original photographs kindly provided by the author. The prose passages are quotations from Ekman's 1988 novel Rovarna i Skuleskogen (The Forest of...

Kerstin Ekman's novel Blackwater took the world by storm in 1993 and has now been translated into over twenty-five languages. But her reputation as one of Sweden's best-known and most successful authors rests just as securely upon the series of four novels she wrote between 1974 and 1983, which are based on the author's childhood home town of Katrineholm some forty miles southwest of Stockholm. The first of these, Witches' Rings, which portrays the final years of the nineteenth century in a small urban community on the cusp of industrialisation, was published by Norvik Press in 1997. The...