The Kulla Gulla Prize to Sara B. Elfgren
A warm congratulation to Sara Bergmark Elfgren, who is the recipient of this year’s Kulla-Gulla Prize.
“Honored and overjoyed, grateful and proud! That’s how I feel after being awarded the Kulla-Gulla Prize! These kinds of awards are incredibly important, and even more so as the public funding of culture is being dismantled. I would like to take this opportunity to express my hope for a future cultural policy that does not come with empty words, but instead uses concrete measures to ensure that the creative arts can flourish throughout our country.”
Sara Bergmark Elfgren
The Kulla-Gulla Prize was established in 1999 by Martha Sandwall-Bergström and is awarded every other year to an author residing in Sweden and writing fiction. The prize sum is 113 000 Swedish Cronas. Among earlier recipients we find Viveca Lärn, Jenny Jägerfeld, Ulf Stark, Frida Nilsson och Jakob Wegelius. The Prize will be awarded at a ceremony at the Book Fair in Gothenburg in September. At the ceremony there will also be an author’s talk with Sara Bergmark Elfgren.
The jury motivation:
“Sara Bergmark Elfgren is given the prize for a powerful and spellbinding storytelling style that moves between minimalist restraint and dramatic expansiveness. In her work, psychological sensitivity and a keen eye for society are combined with a strong sense of atmosphere and time.
Ever since The Circle, which Sara Bergmark Elfgren co-wrote with Mats Standberg, exploded onto the international scene like a Swedish bombshell, she has moved confidently and innovatively between different artistic genres and forms of expression. With one foot firmly grounded in literary history and the other in contemporary pop culture, drama, and genre fiction, she demonstrates how storytelling for young people can be reinvented and can communicate with power to its own time.”
Åsa Warnqvist, chairwomen of the Martha Sandwall-Bergströms Author Foundation and head of Swedish Children’s Literature Foundation:
“The Board is delighted to award this year’s prize to Sara Bergmark Elfgren, a stylist to the very tips of her fingers. A truly deserving laureate!”