The Nordic Center at UC Berkeley and the Honorary Consulate of Sweden – San Francisco, are excited to welcome acclaimed Swedish author, Jonas Hassen Khemiri to the UC Berkeley campus to discuss his latest work, among other topics.

Jonas Hassen Khemiri – Author and Playwright

Jonas Hassen Khemiri is the author of five novels, six plays, and a collection of plays, essays, and short stories. His first novel, One Eye Red (Ett öga rött), received the Borås Tidning Award for Best Literary Debut Novel and became the bestselling paperback in Sweden of any category in 2004.

Khemiri’s novels have been translated into over thirty languages. He is also a celebrated playwright, whose six plays have been performed by over hundred international companies on stages from Stockholm to Berlin to New York to London. With his inventive literary acrobatics and his unwavering social pathos, Jonas Hassen Khemiri is constantly reinventing himself and what language can do – both on the page and in society at large.

His latest novel, The Family Clause (Pappaklausulen), tells the story of a man trying to reconnect with his estranged father while also grappling with his own fatherhood and identity as a Swedish-Tunisian. The book has been well-received by critics and was a finalist for the August Prize, one of Sweden’s most prestigious literary awards.

Professor Linda Rugg -Associate Vice Chancellor for Research and Professor of Swedish Literature

Linda Haverty Rugg is a professor of Swedish Literature at UC Berkeley, where she has been teaching since 1999. She has also served as Chair of her department, Associate Dean of Arts and Humanities, and Chair of the Senate Committee on Courses of Instruction. Her research interests include autobiography, film, photography, painting, ecocriticism, and race studies. Rugg has published two monographs and over two dozen scholarly articles and book chapters. Her book “Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography” won the Modern Language Association’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize in Comparative Literature in 1998. Rugg’s work has been translated into several languages, and she has also translated works from German and Swedish. Her current research focuses on the encounters between two Swedish brothers, Native Americans, and the natural environment of North America in 1712.