Join us in person on Friday, February 2 at 7 PM as Linnea Axelsson presents her epic novel in verse, Aednan. She will be joined in conversation by Jessica Fisher. Co-presented by Orion magazine and Smith Poetry Center.

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About the Book

The winner of Sweden’s most prestigious literary award makes her American debut with an epic, multigenerational novel-in-verse about two Sámi families and their quest to stay together across a century of migration, violence, and colonial trauma.

In Northern Sámi, the word Ædnan means the land, the earth, and my mother. These are all crucial forces within the lives of the Indigenous families that animate this groundbreaking book: an astonishing verse novel that chronicles a hundred years of change: a book that will one day stand alongside Halldór Laxness’s Independent People and Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter as an essential Scandinavian epic.

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 powerful reminder of how durable language can be, even when it is borrowed, especially when it has to hold what no longer remains. “I was the weight / in the stone you brought / back from the coast // to place on / my grave,” one character says to another from beyond the grave. “And I flew above / the boat calling / to you all: // There will be rain / there will be rain.”

About the Author

LINNEA AXELSSON is a Sámi-Swedish writer, born in the province of North Bothnia in Sweden. In 2018, she was awarded the August Prize for this book. She lives in Stockholm, Sweden. Linnea’s US tour is being implemented with the assistance of a grant from the Swedish Arts Council.

About Jessica Fisher

Jessica Fisher is the author of three books of poetry: Frail-Craft, which won the 2006 Yale Younger Poets Prize, Inmost, which was awarded the 2011 Nightboat Poetry Prize, and Daywork, forthcoming from Milkwood Editions. Her poems appear in such journals as The American Poetry Review, The Believer, The Bennington Review, The Colorado Review, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, The Threepenny Review, Tin House, and TriQuarterly, and her translations have been published in The New York Review of Books and The Paris Review. She is co-editor, with Robert Hass, of The Addison Street Anthology. Her honors include the 2012 Rome Prize, a Holloway Postdoctoral Fellowship in Poetry, and a research grant from the Hellman Foundation. She holds a Ph.D. from University of California at Berkeley and is currently an associate professor at Williams College. She lives with her family in Western Massachusetts.