In Quest of Scandi Stature

Organizers of the annual Petrona Award for the Best Scandinavian Crime Novel of the Year today released their shortlist of seven nominees for the 2023 prize. They are:

• Femicide, by Pascal Engman,
translated by Michael Gallagher (Sweden, Legend Press)
• The Corpse Flower, by Anne Mette Hancock,
translated by Tara F. Chace (Denmark, Swift Press)
• The Axe Woman, by Håkan Nesser,
translated by Sarah Death (Sweden, Mantle)
• Land of Snow and Ashes, by Petra Rautiainen,
translated by David Hackston (Finland, Pushkin Press)
• Kalmann, by Joachim B. Schmidt,
translated by Jamie Lee Searle (Switzerland, Bitter Lemon Press)
• Red as Blood, by Lilja Sigurðardóttir,
translated by Quentin Bates (Iceland, Orenda)
• Bitter Flowers, by Gunnar Staalesen,
translated by Don Bartlett (Norway, Orenda)

A winner is expected to be declared on October 12.

The Petrona Award, established back in 2013, takes its name from the blog operated by Maxine Clarke, a British editor and “champion of Scandinavian crime fiction,” who’d died the year before that. As a press release explains, “The Petrona Award is open to crime fiction in translation, either written by a Scandinavian author or set in Scandinavia, and published in the UK in the previous calendar year.”

Click here to see the longlist of contenders for this year’s Petrona.