Thank-you for that, Last Melon. As I also live in Sweden, I notice the huge discrepancy between what sort of brand-new titles you can find in, for instance, Söderbokhandeln or Hedengren's in Stockholm, and the way that English translations are still chugging along with Linnaeus, or have jumped on the crime novel bandwagon.
Being of an older generation, I too am guilty of missing things, so I have never really registered the name Amanda Svensson in my mind, although I try to keep abreast of developments by reading reviews, mostly in SvD, DN, and UNT (I look less at newspapers from Gothenburg and Malmö/Lund). Nevertheless, I am fully aware of the great many smaller publishing houses that publish contemporary Swedish literature of all genres (and mixed genres!), plus those that try their best to promote translations into Swedish (e.g. Tranan with their international short-story series, and Aspekt for Czech literature). If only the Brits & Yanks would focus for five minutes on Swedish non-crime fiction, and asked Swedish literary experts intelligent questions, they would find quite a bit worth translating.
But the responsibility also lies with literary agencies (e.g. Bonnier Group Agency, and Norstedts), plus the Swedish Institute, Kulturrådet, Kulturfonden, and a few other institutions, publishing houses, booksellers and libraries. If the whole literary establishment in Sweden is (self-)satisfied with exporting Mankell-Larsson-Marklund-Guillou-Nesser until the cows come home, Sweden will continue to have the reputation, not as a country for general literature, but great if you want to make masses of money selling fat crime novels to commuters.
Here in Uppsala, for instance, people keep debating all sorts of things including setting up a House of Literature. But as the literary people at the university hardly communicate with the public library (the library has more open literary events than the univeristy itself), not much progress is being made.
And the Strindberg Death Year seems to have almost fizzled out before it has started, because the Swedish state doesn't care about their buspojke (naughty boy) who was a great satirist of the government and the establishment in his prose works, as well as an avant garde playwright. You sometimes feel that the Swedish Duckpond doesn't deserve people like Strindberg, Söderberg, Ekelöf, Boye, and the rest of the modern classics, let alone people writing now. The njasägande cultural bureaucrats have hardly discovered literature as part of education and culture. They are too busy trying to sell Sweden as brand and image, as a nice place to come to visit in the summer and stay in a Falun-red cottage, where you can eat surströmming, buy a bit of cut glass, read nasty violent and yet moralist crime novels written by millionaire Communists, and make money for the Kingdom of Sweden.
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