Translated Fiction: Agnes Lidbeck for All My Love

'What a writer Agnes Lidbeck is - bold, blisteringly intelligent, deliciously playful.'
- Katie Kitamura, author of Audition and Intimacies

Agnes Lidbeck is one of Sweden's most prominent and versatile contemporary writers. She made her literary debut with Supporting Act in 2017, which was shortlisted for the Svenska Dagbladet Prize and won the Boras Tidning Debut Novel Prize. She went on to write Foerlaten ('Forgiven', 2018), Ga foerlorad ('To be Lost', 2019), Nikes bok ('Nike's Book', 2021), All My Love in 2023 and Fotografens skugga ('The Photographer's Shadow', 2026).

Agnes joins us for her brilliant novel, newly published in English by Peirene Press, All My Love.

Petra and Johannes seem made for one another. A lawyer and a doctor. Well brought up, ambitious. Their friends Julia and Axel are different - from them, and from each other. Julia fights for her convictions. Axel manoeuvres his way to political power.

Desire moves like an undertow between them all, dangerous and destabilising. Inconvenient truths are buried, but can only stay that way for so long. Meanwhile, the country around them changes. Laws tighten. Freedoms are curtailed. People begin to disappear. The personal and the political collide.

It is easier, at first, to look away than to let the facts in. Until they arrive at the door.

Praise for Lidbeck's work

'A powerhouse novel about the construction and execution of female identity. In its pages, motherhood, marriage and the very notion of care are meticulously deconstructed. What a writer Agnes Lidbeck is - bold, blisteringly intelligent, deliciously playful.'
- Katie Kitamura, author of Audition and Intimacies

'Taut, restrained, fiercely frank, Agnes Lidbeck's SUPPORTING ACT is a feminist tour de force.'
- Claire Messud, author of This Strange Eventful History

'As a meditation of the role of women, the novel's bluntness belies its complexity. Lidbeck brilliantly depicts the psychology of a person bent on moulding themselves to others' desires.'
- Literary Review

'Perfectly captures the feminised dream-state of caring - and living - for others.'
- Stephanie Sy-Quia, author of A Private Man and Amnion