Peter Handberg
Peter Handberg is a Swedish author and translator. Among a long lists of books and novels he is the author of two works of literary nonfiction about the Baltic States, and two collection of essays of which the latest, The Disconnected Heaven was published in 2011 to critical acclaim. Handberg has also been widely praised for his translations to Swedish, particularly his interpretation of Thoreau’s Walden, published in 2010.
His latest book was Världens yttersta platser – Judiska spår [The world’s outermost places – Jewish traces], 2019. In 2020 he was awarded Doblougska priset [Dobloug price] from the Swedish Academy.
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Articles by Peter Handberg
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The photo albums from German soldiers during WW II have, 75 years after the war’s ending, increasingly been auctioned off at internet auctions. Several photo albums contain traces of Eastern Europe’s Jewish life and how this is suddenly set against the rapidly emerging terror. Throughout many of the images, the photographer’s gaze is on something that is seen as inferior, laughable, exotic, war tourists’ motives worth documenting to show them at home: Eastern European Jews.
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After a pogrom in Berlin in 1923, Alfred Döblin, an assimilated Jew, decided to travel to more originally Jewish settings, spending time amongst the people and environments that barely two decades later were as good as completely wiped out. Döblin’s book Reise in Polen [Journey to Poland] will be published in Swedish translation in autumn 2019. The Swedish translator of Döblin’s book, Peter Handberg travelled to Poland and Ukraine himself in 2018, or to put it more accurately, followed in the footsteps of the Holocaust.
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