Project Manager
Josephson, OlleProject manager
Swedish Humanist AssociationAmount granted
45 000 SEKYear
2013
The biography of Joseph Rooth is currently being written by Anders Björnsson and will be published as a membership book within the Swedish Humanist Association. The book introduces a major international author to a Swedish readership. Many have heard of his novel The Radetzky March from 1932, but otherwise his work has been largely unknown in Sweden. In this book of about 200 pages, the author wants to highlight how Roth relates to his time and how he returns to history to make sense of the turbulence and chaos that the First World War created in the core European countries. Roth participated as a volunteer officer in this war, and these experiences made an indelible impression on him. His childhood and upbringing in eastern Galicia were also formative. Jewish personalities are legion in his books, but so is the mixture of peoples, languages, religions and races that characterized the old imperial Central Europe. In an unpublished essay, Björnsson has uncovered some of the themes of the forthcoming book. The essay can be regarded as a preliminary study for the book, but it does not provide an exhaustive description of its contents. Björnsson has recently translated a collection of stories by Rooth, Kejsarbysten (2012), and has special knowledge from reportage trips in the regions where Roth's books are set and impulses from five (2008-2012) years as editor-in-chief of the international quarterly magazine Baltic Worlds/www.balticworlds.com.