Cecilia Hansson (b. 1973), was born in Luleå and now lives in Stockholm. She is an author, poet and journalist, and regularly contribute in the Swedish daily ”Svenska Dagbladet”. She is a board member of Swedish PEN, holds a Master’s degree in German Literature, and is a well-known expert on Central Europe.

In 2017, she published a book called ”Hopeless But Not Serious”, featuring essays on culture and politics in Central Europe and interviews with known European intellectuals, such as Marina Abramovich and Herta Müller. It also contains a close and extensive interview with László Krasznahorkai, made in Budapest 2015.

In 2024, her novel ”Kafka’s Lung” was published, and as her previous novels ”Au Pair” and ”Snow & Potatoes” it was highly praised by critics, and awarded the ”De Nios Vinterpris” by Samfundet De Nio and the ”Eva Bonniers 70-årsfond” prize.
The book is a close, personal reading of Kafka’s collected works – in the light of our times. Hansson has dug in archives in Vienna, in Prague and in northern Sweden, and visited the sanatorium in the Torneo Valley where her grandmother was treated for her tuberculosis. And most of all, she has dug into herself. With Franz Kafka’s help. In this European novel, two sets of lungs meet and breathe as one.

The novel ”Au Pair” (2019), deals with the relationship between failure, longing and creativity, about becoming oneself and becoming an artist. In connection with this, Hansson’s poetry collections were reissued as a collected volume, with a newly written foreword by the poet Kristian Lundberg. The subsequent ”Snö och potatis” (Snow and Potatoes, 2021) is a novel from northern Sweden, about motherhood and death, and about how the shadows of anxiety are cast across generations.

In 2019, Cecilia Hansson received the prestigious Sorescu Prize for her writing and a special scholarship from Natur och Kultur. In 2021, she was awarded the Bernadotte Scholarship from the Swedish Academy.