Gunnel Annakarin Svedberg is a Swedish author. Common themes in her works include women's issues, lesbianism and feminist politics.
Career
Svedberg was born in 1934 in Halmstad, and moved to Malmö with her family in 1941. Svedberg's first novel, Vårvinterdagbok, was published in 1957. The book was well received, and one critic wrote: "The promise in Annakarin Svedberg's book above all lies in the linguistic purity of her wit, which sparkles like the late winter sun through her window, in the grace of her phrases, in the exquisite taste she demonstrates in every passage." She published her second novel, Ack, denna själ! in 1958. In 1962, Svedberg published Vingklippta, her third novel and her first piece of writing about lesbianism. The book, which presents a positive depiction of a lesbian relationship, was considered a Beat novel and drew comparisons to Jack Kerouac, Jackson Pollock, Henry Miller and Selma Lagerlöf. She followed Vingklippta with three more novels about lesbians: Det goda livet, Se uppför trollen! eller: Äntligen en bok om livet sådant det verkligen är, and Din egen. Svedberg depicted homosexuality as no different from heterosexuality, although her lesbian characters often faced prejudice and injustice. Literary criticJenny Björklund wrote in Lesbianism in Swedish Literature: An Ambiguous Affair that Svedberg's writings "contribute to opening up discursive space for a more tolerant attitude to lesbianism". In the 1960s Svedberg also authored a famous short story, a pornographic parody of Little Red Riding Hood. She published Kärlek är det innersta av hjärtat, a book in the form of a diary, in 1976. Two years later, she wrote En enda jord, an academic book about religious values held by different cultures. Her work gradually became more political and focused on feminist ideas, and she was a contributor to the radical feminist magazine Kvinnobulletinen. In 1985 she helped to found Kvinnopartiet, a short-lived radical feminist political party in Sweden. She self-published the book Sex Kristalliska Berättelser in 1994, and since the late 1990s has written numerous books about travel and spirituality.
Personal life
Svedberg has two children with Frank Scott, a singer from the United States with whom she lived in the late 1950s.
