EKMAN, Kerstin (Lillemor) 1933-

PERSONAL: Born August 27, 1933, in Risinge, Sweden; father, a manufacturer. Education: Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden, M.A., 1957.

ADDRESSES: Home—Sweden. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Doubleday, 1540 Broadway, New York, NY 10036.

CAREER: Writer. Worked as high school teacher of Swedish and Swedish literature; literary critic, television writer and producer.

AWARDS, HONORS: Best Swedish Detective Story Prize, 1961, for Tre sma maestare; elected to Swedish Academy, 1978 (resigned in protest, 1989, due to Academy's insufficient support to Salman Rushdie); Selma Lagerloef Prize, 1989; Award for Best Crime Novel from the Swedish Crime Academy; August Prize; Literary Prize of the Nordic Council, for Haendelser vid vatten, translation published as Blackwater.

WRITINGS:

Menedarna, Bonnier (Stockholm, Sweden), 1970.

Moerker och blaebaersris (title means "Darkness and Blueberry Scrub"), [Sweden], 1972, Literaturfraemjandet (Stockholm, Sweden), 1990.

Haexringarna (first novel in tetralogy; title means "The Witches' Rings"), Bonnier (Stockholm, Sweden), 1974, translation by Linda Schenck published as Witches' Rings, Norvik Press (Chester Springs, PA), 1997.

Springkaellan (second novel in tetralogy), Bonnier (Stockholm, Sweden), 1976, translation by Linda Schenck published as The Spring, Norvik Press (Chester Springs, PA), 2002.

Vykort fraan Katrineholm, Bonnier (Stockholm, Sweden), 1977.

Aenglahuset (third novel in tetralogy; title means "House of Angels"), Bonnier (Stockholm, Sweden), 1979.

Doedsklockan, (detective novel; title means "The Death Knell"), Bonnier (Stockholm, Sweden), 1979.

En stad av ljus (fourth novel in tetralogy; title means "A Town of Light"), Bonnier (Stockholm, Sweden), 1983.

Hunden, Bonnier (Stockholm, Sweden), 1986.

Roevarna i Skuleskogen (novel; title means "The Robbers in Skule Forest"), Bonnier (Stockholm, Sweden), 1988, translation by Anna Paterson published as The Forest of Hours, Chatto & Windus (London, England), 1998.

Knivkastarens kvinna (verse epic; title means "The Knife Thrower's Woman"), MaenPocket (Stockholm, Sweden), 1991.

Haendelser vid vatten, Bonnier (Stockholm, Sweden), 1993, translation by Joan Tate published as Blackwater, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1996.

Raetten att haeda, Svenska rushdiekommitten (Stockholm, Sweden), 1994.

Goer mig levande igen, Bonnier (Stockholm, Sweden), 1996, translation by Joan Tate published as Under the Snow, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1998.

Rovarna i Skuleskogen, translation by Anna Paters published as The Forest of House, Chatto & Windus (London, England), 1998.

Guds barmhaertighet, Bonnier (Stockholm, Sweden), 1999.

Urminnes tecken, Bonnier (Stockholm, Sweden), 2000.

Springkallan, translation by Linda Schenck published as The Spring, Norvik Press (Norwich, England), 2001.

The Angel House, preface by Sarah Death, Norvik Press (Chester Springs, PA), 2002.

Also author of 30 meter mord, 1959; Han roer paa sig, 1960; Kalla famnen, 1960; Tre sma maestare (detective novel; title means "Three Little Masters"), 1961; Den brinnnande ugnen, 1962; Pukehornet, 1967; and Mine Herrar. . . , 1986.

SIDELIGHTS: Before she became a full-time author, Kerstin Ekman was a teacher and literary critic as well as active in the film and television industry as a writer and producer. She began her writing career as an author of popular detective novels. One of them, Tre sma maestare, won the prize for Best Swedish Detective fiction in 1961.

With Doedsklockan, Ekman began writing a more psychological novel, with only the bare bones of the traditional detective novel still in evidence. In his contribution to the Encyclopedia of World Literature Lars G. Warme noted, "[Ekman] now places greater emphasis on psychological complications and on the way characters interact as a group. The author also gives particular attention to the description of milieu: The autumnal landscape and the details surrounding a moose hunt are based on exact observation and evoked with remarkable concreteness."

In Menedarna, published in 1970, Ekman examined an actual historical event, the 1915 Utah execution of the Swedish labor agitator and songwriter Joe Hill in the early years of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World).

Kerstin Ekman's novel, Haendelser vid vatten, translated by Joan Tate as Blackwater, "is being marketed as a thriller—but of the longer, denser and more erotic variety, the kind that comes along once every few years and usually attracts a big audience," wrote Beverly Lowry in the New York Times Book Review. The novel traces how the murders of a man and woman affect the rural Swedish community of Blackwater and specific townspeople eighteen years later. Writing in Publishers Weekly, Sybil Steinberg praised the novel as "splendid fiction, dark and compelling . . . told smoothly through multiple points of view." Commenting on Ekman's descriptive prose, Washington Post Book World contributor Sven Birkerts observed: "Ekman's somber moods are most effective. Nature here is no picturesque backdrop, but an animated presence, the kind we might ourselves register if we were lost in the deep woods at sunset." Similarly, Lowry remarked: "Throughout the novel, Ms. Ekman's descriptions of the countryside are lush and lovingly rendered. Landscape—what we've come to call the environment—becomes a character here, as fully developed and as important to the plot as human beings."

As investigation of the murders—which had remained unsolved for nearly twenty years—resumes due to new evidence, the village of Blackwater draws tightly in to protect its own. Seemingly shocked by the crime but suspicious of any questions about the past, the residents reject implications that a Blackwater citizen could be the perpetrator. Birkerts praised Ekman's ability to create vivid characters: "It is a thrilling tangle, this cast of characters that seems to generate more and more darkness as we turn the pages." Describing Blackwater as a fascinating, gripping, and dutifully crafted narrative, Lowry concluded: "Ms. Ekman provides us with a rich adventure, the kind of long, lush page-turner many of us crave but rarely get our hands on."

Ekman's Under the Snow is another psychological thriller set in a small village in northern Sweden. In the dead of winter Police Constable Torsson receives a call from the village of Rakisjokk. Artist and teacher Matti Olsson has been killed, forcing Torsson to get there by the only means possible in winter: a 25-mile trek on skis across a frozen lake. When he arrives, however, the inhabitants don't want to talk and what they do say doesn't seem logical. Unexplainable details appear, and Torsson is unable to blame anything but the terrible cold for Olsson's death.

By accident, the case is reopened when Olsson's friend David Malm makes a summer visit and meets a girl who has hit a reindeer with her car. In the car, Malm discovers a knapsack containing a bloody noose covered with human hair. This revelation forces Torsson to return to the village, now in the midst of Arctic summer. "Slowly and painfully, the two penetrate the peculiar psychology of people who live half their lives in darkness, cut off from the rest of the world. Ekman's brilliant evocation of a place and culture above the Arctic Circle is as compelling and mysterious as the crime itself," wrote Cynthia Johnson in Library Journal.

In 1997 the first volume of the tetralogy, Witches' Rings, was published in English. The saga spans the last hundred years in a farming town in rural Sweden as industrialization begins to affect the villages. Unlike the tightly plotted Blackwater, Witches' Rings revolves around three women, Sara Sabine Lans, her daughter Edla, and Edla's daughter Tora. New York Times writer Margaret Livesey noted, "Here [Ekman] is primarily interested in realism, and it is realism with a vengeance. Thus she avoids the choices that have comforted Western readers. Tess of the D'Urbervilles, for example, undergoes many of the same trials as Sara and her descendants, but Thomas Hardy makes Tess a heroine, a woman whose suffering has meaning and whose life is shaped by majestic forces of destiny. In contrast, Ekman's characters can hardly qualify as heroines; they suffer without redemption of any kind."

The tone of the book is set from the opening page: "This was Sara Sabine Lans: gray as a rat, poor as a louse, pouchy and lean as a vixen in summer. No one called her by her given name. . . . She had her children and the croft with its potato patch, a cottage nearly smothered by lilacs as the years passed, but where happiness had no place. . . . She smoked hams for the farmers. That was her cleanest job. Otherwise, there was nothing so coarse, so filthy or so foul that she wouldn't do it. She scrubbed down cowsheds in the spring. She took in laundry and helped with butchering. She laid out the dead. She toiled all her life for leftovers and favors. She was hardy as grass, prickly as nettles."

In the early pages, Edla comes the closest to being the main character. At the age of thirteen, she goes to work at Isaksson's inn. Her life at home has been so poor that neither her endless work nor the table that serves for her bed seem bad at all. She appreciates the abundant food and the glimpse of exotic passengers who stop at the inn. She soon gets pregnant and comes to term without even knowing it. When she gives birth on a lonely country road and falls into a fever and dies without ever knowing she had a daughter, Ekman reveals the unrelenting brutality of poverty that was often the case in the nineteenth-century Swedish countryside.

Livesey concluded, "No reader would want to daydream herself back into this time and place. What the novel accomplishes, however, is something much more important: it reminds us, in the most immediate fashion, just how much our world has changed—even as it forces us to recognize how stubbornly persistent the emotional undercurrents of that world may turn out to be."

The second book in the series, translated as The Spring, focuses on the lives of three different women. Bakery owner Torn struggles against a male-dominated culture while Freida, an overworked washerwoman, silently endures her fate. The third, Ingrid, is a passionate rebel determined to get an education and rise above her environment. A Kirkus Reviews contributor praised the book, writing, "Ekman's masterly dramatizations of the contrasts between home and hearth and the intimidating wider world beyond them—whose uncertainty is crystallized in the recurring theme of the need for pure drinking water—as well as her precise characterizations and robust humor, make the moving novel (after Witches' Rings, 1997), an essential component of what begins to look like an extended work of major importance."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Ekman, Kerstin, Witches' Rings, Norvik Press (Chester Springs, PA), 1997.

Encyclopedia of World Literature, 3rd edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999, p. 19.

Robinson, Lillian S., editor, Modern Women Writers, Continuum Press (New York, NY), 1996.

Zuck, Virpi, editor, Dictionary of Scandinavian Literature, Greenwood Press (New York, NY), 1990.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, January 1, 1998, Bill Ott, review of Under the Snow, p. 782.

Kirkus Reviews, October 15, 1997, review of Witches' Rings, p. 1549; November 1, 1997, review of Under the Snow, p. 405.

Library Journal, January, 1996, p. 141; December, 1997, Cynthia Johnson, review of Under the Snow, p. 150.

New Statesman and Society, April 21, 1995, p. 37.

New Yorker, March 30, 1998, review of Under the Snow, p. 123.

New York Times Book Review, March 17, 1996, p. 24; March 9, 1997, review of Blackwater, p. 28; February 22, 1998, Margot Livesey, review of Witches' Rings and Under the Snow, p. 28; February 14, 1999, review of Under the Snow, p. 32.

Observer (London, England), October 24, 1999, review of The Forest of Hours, p. 15.

Publishers Weekly, December 4, 1995, p. 51; November 10, 1997, review of Witches' Rings, p. 57; November 24, 1997, review of Under the Snow, p. 53.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 26, 1997, Jan Garden Castro, review of Under the Snow, p. 5C.

Scandinavian Studies, winter, 1998, Linda Havery Rugg, review of Roevarna i Skuleskogen, p. 425.

Times (London, England), November 8, 1997, Emily Bearn, review of Under the Snow, p. 20; November 12, 1998, Ruth Scurr, review of The Forest of Hours, p. 42.

Times Literary Supplement, November 20, 1998, Heather O'Donoghue, review of The Forest of Hours, p. 21; November 30, 2001, Julia Lovell, review of The Spring, p. 24.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), February 16, 1997, review of Blackwater, p. 8.

Washington Post Book World, March 3, 1996, p. 9.

World Literature Today, spring, 1997, Margaretta Mattsson, review of Goer mig levande igen, p. 405; autumn, 1999, review of Guds barmhaertighet, p. 764.*