Anna-Karin Selberg is a philosopher and author living in Stockholm with her two daughters. She earned her Ph.D. in philosophy in 2021 with her dissertation Politics and Truth: Heidegger, Arendt, and the Modern Political Lie. She has been researching Russian propaganda using Hannah Arendt's concept of political lying. Selberg's research explores how this version of the political lie manifests today.

In 2024, she published her book The Outside Class, a novel about the high-profile trial of the so-called Culture Profile. In autumn 2026, her latest novel The Wolves is to be published.

Agent: Erik Larsson

Published Wahlström & Widstrand, October 2026
Genre Literary Fiction
Pages 388

Rights sold
Swedish: Wahlström & Widstrand

It is summer and there is an unbearable heatwave. A-K is awaiting the upcoming trial in September, and paranoia is mounting. Who can you trust when the world that protected the perpetrator has crumbled – and those fighting to regain their reputation are losing all restraint? The media attention is immense and evidence is being presented freely. Everything in the past leaves traces – and anything could turn up in court as evidence.

In another timeline, the autumn in which Elisabet Selberg – a radical lawyer and legal representative for the prosecution – dies is interwoven with the autumn of the 2018 trial. It is the 1990s. A-K is about to start sixth form and has left the big house in the countryside. It is Gothenburg’s underground scene, parties and friends. And a mother who is about to die.

The Wolves is a standalone sequel to A-K Selberg’s series about the legal proceedings against the “Cultural Figure” and the corruption scandal that rocked the Swedish Academy.

Published Wahlström & Widstrand, September 2024
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

"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