Chair No. 9 - Ellen Mattson

Author.
Elected: 2019.

Ellen Mattson’s novels and plays focus on human relationships and socially assigned roles, and how they relate to the underlying question of the freedom of the individual.

Ellen Mattson was born in Uddevalla in 1962 and still lives in the area. She has studied languages and literature, and piano at the Vadstena Adult Education Centre. Though a certified librarian, she currently works as a full-time author and critic. Mattson has written literary criticism for the Swedish newspapers Göteborgs-Tidningen, Bohusläningen, Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten, for whom she has also worked as a columnist. She has also written reviews for the Swedish Arts Council and the Swedish Authors’ Fund.

Mattson has also written plays, including the radio play Tidigt på morgonen (Early in the Morning) from 1999. For Bohusläns Theatre she dramatized Emelie Flygare-Carlén’s Rosen på Tistelön (The Rose of Tistelön, 1842). Mattsson’s own novels Glädjestranden (The Beach of Joy, 2008) and Sommarleken (The Summer Game, 2016) have both been serialised on Sveriges Radio.

Mattson’s readers know her primarily as a novelist. She made her debut with the novel Nattvandring (Night Excursion), published in 1992 by Albert Bonniers Förlag. Her breakthrough in terms of gaining critical acclaim and a wider readership came in 1998 with Resenärerna (The Travellers), which was awarded the Svenska Dagbladet Literature Prize. The following year, the novel Poetens liv (The Life of the Poet) was published, in which we become acquainted with the author Jan Rorsack, who has written biographies of Almqvist and Rilke and is currently in the process of completing a biography of the poet Dorotea Vik – an old friend who died prematurely on account of her self-destructive lifestyle. A parallel narrative follows a German author who has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and now lives in exile in 1930s Paris. Strikingly similar to the real-life Thomas Mann, the depiction of the author’s life mirrors Rorsack’s work on the biography of Dorotea Vik.

Several of Mattson’s books take their themes from the past, and they are often populated by historical figures. One example is the novel Vinterträdet (The Winter Tree, 2012), in which Greta Garbo’s life in her film-star heyday is portrayed through the eyes of her secretary. Mattson thereby creates a double portrait of two highly active figures in the early days of film. Her novel Snö (2001; Snow, 2005) describes the period following the retreat of the Swedish army from Norway upon the death of Charles XII, while Tornet och fåglarna (The Tower and the Birds, 2017) is about Commander Henrich Danckwardt and the loss of the Marstrand fortress during the harsh war year of 1719. In Den svarta månens år (The Year of the Black Moon), which was nominated for the 2022 August Prize, a man searches for something that has been lost in a world that is often governed by the absurd logic of dreams. Her latest novel, Konsten att försvinna (The Art of Disappearing, 2025), is a terse and condensed depiction of friendship and its trials.

Ellen Mattson assumed her post on chair number 9 of the Swedish Academy at the Annual General Meeting on 20 December 2019.