ANNA-KARIN SELBERG is a philosopher and author based in Stockholm. She earned her Ph.D. in philosophy in 2021 with her dissertation Politics and Truth: Heidegger, Arendt, and the Modern Political Lie. Currently, she is researching Russian propaganda using Hannah Arendt's concept of political lying. Selberg's research explores how this version of the political lie manifests today. She lives in a suburb of Stockholm with her two daughters.

In 2024, she published her latest book, THE OUTSIDE CLASS, a novel about the high-profile trial of the so-called Culture Profile.

Agent Erik Larsson

PUBLISHED 2024, wahlström & Widstrand
GENRE LITERARY FICTION
PAGES 576

all RIGHTS available

In November 2017, a piece in Sweden’s most influential daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter hit the cultural sphere like a bomb. Eighteen women came forward with accusations of sexual harassment and abuse against a man known as JC, the "Cultural Profile", who had close ties to the Swedish Academy – the prestigious institution responsible for awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature. These accusations, emerging during the global #MeToo movement, revealed years of alleged misconduct and sparked a monumental public outcry, bringing to light the deep-seated issues within the cultural establishment. The novel depicts a time when 'witch trials', conspiracy theories and myths became part of reality.  

THE OUTSIDE CLASS intertwines a personal history with the societal upheavals of 1980s and 1990s Sweden. The siblings A-K and Lars are raised in a sprawling house converted into a hostel by their parents. Their mother, a lawyer who defies her father's violent expectations by rejecting the Bar Association, is a multifaceted figure whose ambitions both hold the family together and create fractures, leaving the children to navigate a turbulent, unsupervised childhood.

Now a mother herself, A-K is forced to confront the lingering trauma of her past by reporting being raped by JC years earlier – an act that not only reopens old wounds but also resurrects memories of her long-deceased mother. In this way, the novel also delves into the repercussions of the MeToo movement in Sweden, culminating in the scandal surrounding the Swedish Academy and the eventual cancellation of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature.

REVIEWS

“‘The Outside Class’ consists of many carefully crafted portraits of the same person. Layer upon layer of a face, all coloured by different times, places and necessities. Together, they create a whole in which the person is allowed to be full of flaws, while the stylist remains cool […] It is moving and well crafted, as layer after layer of integrity and individuality is peeled away. Newspapers and colleagues, the legal system, friends, the self: they all have cool fingers that pick, pick, pick at the author's body."
Göteborgs-Posten, Agnes Lidbeck

"It's good, intelligent and congenial. Small pieces of information in quickly recounted details, such as the mother and Sara Danius' shared cancer, older women's experiences of sexual abuse that can only be interpreted by adults [...] Some call it revenge and sensationalism, but then they haven't understood anything. To take revenge on someone, it's enough to leak information on Flashback. Anyone who wants to explain how it all fits together, the whole picture, takes much greater personal risks."
Aftonbladet, Sofia Lilly Jönsson

“Selberg resists the temptation to glorify herself; instead, she describes what it does to you to take on a limiting role within one system – the legal system – in order to try to destroy another system: the corrupt cultural sphere that surrounds the perpetrator.”
Dagens Nyheter, Ylva Perera

“It is courageous and convincing. But it is also an interesting, subtly composed and multi-layered novel about neuroses and anguish and what makes people act the way they do.”
Arbetarbladet, Bodil Juggas

“The new direction in historiography must be to once again make the plaintiffs in sexual assault cases individuals with real lives. This book does that, and A-K Selberg takes the stylistic approach that the subject demands.”
Expressen, Martina Montelius