Karin Altenberg | Contributors to Slightly Foxed literary review magazine

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Karin Altenberg was born and brought up in southern Sweden. She moved to Britain to study in 1996 and holds a PhD in Archaeology. Her first novel, Island of Wings, was nominated for the Orange Prize and the Saltire Award. Her second novel Breaking Light was published in 2014. She is a reviewer of fiction and non-fiction and a published translator of poetry, non-fiction and fiction from Swedish into English.

The numbers in square brackets refer to the issue of the quarterly in which the article appears.
The unbracketed numbers refer to the starting page of the article.
For entries in multiple issues of the quarterly, the occurrences are separated by semi-colons.

articles by, [51] 20; [61] 66; Island of Wings, [73] 31

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Fulmar, Gannet and Puffin

Maggie Fergusson on Karin Altenberg, Island of Wings

In shelves to the left and right of the fireplace in our dining-room, my husband keeps an extensive collection of books about Scotland. Half a shelf is given over to volumes on St Kilda. If ever I feel the need to escape from Hammersmith to a landscape of vast skies, mountainous waves, sea-spray blowing like white mares’ tails across the rocks, this is where I turn: to the extraordinary archipelago, 110 miles west of the Scottish mainland, whose black cliffs and dizzying stacks, the highest in Britain, unfold in a drumroll of Gaelic names – Mullach Mor, Mullach Bi, Conachair.

On the Wings of History

Karin Altenberg on Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy

Kristin Lavransdatter is a love story – but a masterly one that begins, in the first book of the trilogy, with Kristin swiftly breaking her society’s norms of patriarchy, duty and honour in order to give herself over to erotic passion. Undset viewed eroticism – a desire so profound that life would be intolerable if it were not satisfied – as part of the spiritual sphere. Kristin falls, in every way, for the handsome but clearly unsuitable Erlend Nikulaussøn, although her father has already pledged her to the thoroughly decent Simon Darre. When the wedding between Kristin and Erlend is finally allowed to happen, at the end of the first book, it is an excruciating affair, the bridal crown weighing so heavily on Kristin’s head that she can hardly sit upright at the banquet.

Strindberg’s Island

Karin Altenberg on August Strindberg, The People of Hemsö

One early autumn, when life wasn’t going exactly to plan, I joined two friends sailing around the Stockholm archipelago, the 20,000 islands and skerries that protect the approach to the Swedish capital from the Baltic. As afternoon sank into evening we set course for the outer islands and Kymmendö, the setting of August Strindberg’s novel The People of Hemsö (Hemsöborna).

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