Ola Larsmo - Author
Oct 08, 2019
Ola Larsmo
Ola Larsmo - Author

Swedish author Ola Larsmo joins us to discuss his latest book Swede Hollow

"I guess it was the silence that caught my imagination. It was very deep, in the middle of a bustling city."

My wife, Rita, had spent an important year as an exchange student in Minneapolis and wanted to visit old friends. When we first went there in 2006, I knew that I was in for quite a ride. The stories from the Swedish mass migration in the 1850s up to World War I has left a huge mark in Swedish collective consciousness – one that was given a distinct form by the classic suite of novels by Vilhelm Moberg, The Emigrants (1949) and the three sequels, books that are still widely circulated and have sold more than one million copies. The success of Moberg’s novels was very well-deserved – but they also shaped the picture of the Swedish emigrant as the hard-working, stubborn, and eventually successful farmer on the prairie or in the Minnesota forest.