Wera von Essen (b.1986) was raised in one of Sweden's oldest cities, Uppsala. As a translator and writer, she debuted with A Debutant’s Diary in 2018. The novel earned her the 2019 Borås Tidning Debutant Prize and was praised for a stylistic certainty in exploring creation, its conditions, and boundaries. Wera also received the Swedish Academy’s scholarship for young and promising writers – the Gerard Bonnier Fund. Her second novel, Violence and Intimate Conversations (2020), was nominated for the Vi Literature Prize.

Her work exists in a space between fact and fiction, dealing with spirituality and divine elements, eroticism and mysticism, and the parallels between BDSM and religious submission. Her novel Reply to D (2021), explores the search for the self in light of Christian faith, depicting desire, love and despair. In 2022, Wera was awarded the Berns Prize for her vivid depiction of Stockholm's underbelly, creating a new field within contemporary Swedish fiction.

Wera’s latest work, Mothers and Men, was published in May 2026.

Agent: Moa Alfvén

Published Polaris, May 2026
Genre Fiction
Pages 200

Since her debut in 2018, Wera von Essen has time and time again demonstrated her versatility as a writer – one who masters both profundity and immediacy in the form of the diary, and who conveys intimacy with precision within the confines of the novella. Mothers and Men is her first collection of short stories, marking a new phase in her writing career: a fictional exploration of human relationships – destructive, inescapable, fleeting and enduring. It is about being a mother, having a mother and wanting to be a mother. It is about slaying the dragon, at least once in a lifetime.

Published Polaris, January 2024
Genre Fiction
Pages 483

Wera von Essen has returned to the diary format. In this new book, it is an established author who has the floor, but she still has the same searching gaze, the same uncompromising willingness to go deep in terms of faith, writing, love. She lives her life between two continents, in Sweden and Brazil, and examines life in both countries with the eyes of an outsider.

Reviews

"It is this great, essential humanity, a life force made into sentences, as light as dark, that makes the book inalienable."
– Victor Malm, Expressen

"Her voice is dazzling and grand as it boldly seeks to make sense of the flux of a life in an era of chaotic misery."
– Carl-Michael Edenborg, Aftonbladet

"Wera von Essen does it with gusto. An Emigrant's Diary absolutely floored me. It's sexy because it feels so incredibly real."
– UNT

Published Polaris, 2021
Genre Fiction
Pages 96

The new prose book Reply to D is a letter about a David with a Daniel in his memory. It’s a letter to a You, perhaps a letter to all of them, who are also all the same, written by an I who is frantically searching for a permanence in love, for trust and faith. I knew I was calling to you, the heart that cries out to the universe, why is it so wrong to want to be saved from yourself, to want someone to save you, there is a time for everything, I don't call anymore, not since that day, the heart can only break so many times.

A beautiful epistolary novel depicting the grief and crisis that occurs after losing two lovers, David and Daniel. This is the letter to the two absent D's fused together, with themes of the desire for love and the pain of being left behind. For fear of losing herself, she turns to the Catholic faith, in an attempt to save herself.

Reviews

“Wera von Essen’s third and most stylized novel... Reply to D should be read after dusk in a single sitting. von Essen’s language is powerful, sometimes closed, and the narrator sees meaning in everything, including pain. Maybe it’s a kind of self-preservation, it doesn’t matter, because she captivates like a mystic.”
- Dagens Nyheter

Published Natur & Kultur, 2020
Genre Fiction
Pages 129

“I thought, all these years, for as long as I can remember, the world has been the hardest thing, if I exist in the world, I don't exist anyway, which was confirmed once and for all in a closed ward, I sometimes compare it to a monastery, the other side from which the illusion becomes tangible and the knowledge that I was never there anyway, so it doesn't matter, so I might as well tell, so I can be a tool.”

In her grief over the lack of contact in the world, she takes the bus number 4 through the city. In it there are lovers who hit the right way, psychoanalysis, hotel jobs, church. There is a growing faith and a longing to give herself completely.

Wera von Essen has written an autofictional, evocative novel about pain and spiritual struggle, about the relationship between perversion and the sacred, and about relationships at a time when love seems to be absent.

Reviews

"At a breaking point between skinlessness and drastic arrogance, Wera von Essen has created her own little literary world – headstrong, elegant and engaging."
- Svenska Dagbladet

"von Essen very nicely captures the pleasures of submission, without ever romanticizing them, making them porous or aesthetic in the wrong way."
- Göteborgs-Posten

Published Modernista, 2018
Genre Fiction
Pages 281

“The weekend told me this: I have to become obsessed. I have to hijack everything. I have to take my own drama very seriously. Nothing must be more important than my own drama. After I had fainted in Traneberg, Stig called and asked me what the blood moon means. He has understood what I am all about. We were silent for a long time on the phone. The faces of the people of Östermalm seemed to grimace today, elegant and resigned. My self-doubt is too strong. It presses on, hard, hard, demanding to be overcome. It doesn't work anymore, I have to start journaling again. Otherwise I will, as they say, "lose it".”

Wera von Essen has created a fictional character of herself. In Wera's diary notes, we follow her struggle to be published. She lives a self-imposed life of poverty in Berlin despite her class background, jumping between jobs, the fear of failure ever present. After several rejections by publishers, she receives a yes for another book she is writing – her diary.

Reviews

"With her finger in the air, it probably leans towards the classics."
- BTJ

"I love writers who oscillate between megalomania and self-loathing. Writers who hiss, spit, sigh and drill down into themselves, while writing about everything that comes their way. When they do it with a large dose of humour, I become obsessed. An author who meets all these criteria and many more is Wera von Essen, who published her first novel this spring."
- Aftonbladet