"Literature Speaks" – with PEN USA

Featured are crime novelists Håkan Nesser, Inger Frimansson, Helen Tursten, Kjell Eriksson, Cara Black, Stephen Cooper, and Leslie Schwartz, Moderator.

Location:
The Swedish Residence
725 Adelaide Place
Santa Monica, CA 90402

Time:
April 27 at 6.30 pm
Open to the public and free of charge but
must register to attend, space limited.
Send email to: beyondblond3@foreign.ministry.se

Literature Speaks

Participating Authors:
Håkan Nesser was awarded the Swedish Crime Writers’ Academy Prize for new authors for his novel The Wide-Meshed Net; he received the best novel award for Borkmann’s Point and Woman with a Birthmark. He was awarded the Crime Writers of Scandinavia’s Glass Key Award for the best crime novel of the year for Carambole. The Return is his second novel to be translated into English (Borkmann’s Point was published in 2006 and a paperback version is available from Vintage Books). Nesser lives in Sweden, but is currently spending a year in the United States.

Helene Tursten, is the author of Detective Inspector Huss and The Torso, which is now a German film and will be released in paperback from Soho Crime this April. In addition, her series is being filmed for Swedish television. She lives with her husband in Göteborg.

Kjell Eriksson is a Swedish author whose crime debut, The Illuminated Path, was named Best First Novel of 1999 byt the Swedish Crime Academy.  The Princess of Burundi won Best Swedish Crime Novel in 2002.  Erksson’s novels are bestsellers in Sweden, and his popularity is skyrocketing in Germany, Denmark, Italy, Norway, and the Netherlands.  He lives with his wife and children in Uppsala, Sweden.

Inger Frimansson, author and journalist, is by many considered to be Sweden’s premier author of psychological thrillers. Critics place her novels in the same class as the best English and American novels in the genre and she is very often compared to Minette Walters in particular. Inger Frimansson's writing is characterized by the way she sees the dark and morbid reality behind what seems to be an idyll. Her style is concise and suggestive and she has since long established herself as one of Sweden's best-selling crime thriller writers.

Stephen Cooper, Professor of English at California State University at Long Beach, writes scholarly articles in literary magazines and film journals, as well as short stories in such periodicals as Southwest Review, The Threepenny Review, American Fiction, and Hot Type. He is the editor of Perspectives on John Huston and the author of Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante. Cooper edited the manuscript of John Fante's last book, The Big Hunger: Stories 1932-1959, and is also a co-editor of John Fante: A Critical Gathering. His biography of Fante and his edition of The John Fante Reader were named among the Los Angeles Times Best Books of the Year.

Cara Black lives in San Francisco with her husband, a bookseller, and teenage son. She's Northern California Mystery Writers of America chapter president, on the Sisters in Crime board and member of the Marais Historic Society in Paris. Her nationally bestselling Aimée Leduc Investigation series, set in Paris, has been nominated for several mystery awards. Murder on the Ile Saint-Louis, her current book and 7th in the series, received a starred review in Publisher's Weekly and of it the New York Times says "...if the cobblestones could talk, they might tell a tale as haunting as the one Black tells." Her books are translated into Japanese, Italian and Hebrew - but not Swedish.  She's published by Soho Press, as Helene
Tursten, and gets to Paris whenever she can. Her website is www.carablack.com

Moderator: Leslie Schwartz, President of of the board of directors of PEN USA is an award-winning, best-selling literary novelist with two novels and dozens of short stories, articles and essays under her belt. Critics call her work “provocative” and “harshly beautiful,” and have said “she writes with heat-hazed elegance and subtle control.” Her work explores themes of love, grief and spiritual transformation. Schwartz is a passionate speaker, teacher, and tireless promoter of literacy in underserved communities. In 2004, was named Kalliope Magazine’s Woman Writer of the Year. Her first novel Jumping the Green, (Simon & Schuster 1999) won the James Jones Literary Society Award for Best First Novel. Her second novel Angels Crest, (Doubleday 2004) was a Los Angeles Times bestseller, a Booksense 76 pick, and was translated into nine languages. She spends most of her time teaching writing to youth in underserved and marginalized communities, including juvenile hall and Homeboy Industries in Boyle Heights, where she is now setting up a literary press. She contributes to the Los Angeles Times Book Review and is currently working on a story about minors who are sentenced for crimes, many of which they did not commit, to life sentences without the possibility of parole. For more information log on to her website at www.leslieschwartz.com.