Salminen, Johannes

His father was a fervid Finn and his mother an Ålander, and this made issues of belonging a vital part of his formative years in the Åland islands. Johannes Salminen’s (1925 Hammarland, Åland – 2015 Helsinki) first language was Swedish, which he put to subtle and stylish use in some twenty books. The vast majority of these were themed collections of essays, but his œuvre also includes a Ph.D. thesis in literary history, biographical studies, and epistolary dialogues. Two of these dialogic correspondences are very Baltic indeed, consisting of letters exchanged between Salminen and Jaan Kaplinski (Estonia). They resulted in Sjunger näktergalen än i Dorpat? (Can you still hear the nightingale in Tartu?) 1990 and Vita nätter och svarta (Nights white and black) 2002.
Salminen moved to the Finnish mainland for academic studies, and remained there for the rest of his life and throughout his long career with the publishing house of Söderström & Co (1956–1991). He headed this firm for thirty years, attracting writers of renown or making them such. One of his many interests as a writer in his own right was Finland-Swedish literature. Yet he firmly refused to be enlisted as a Finland-Swede: he was happy to be an Ålander based in Helsinki, a non-co-opted observer.
This stance is closely related to a recurrent motif in Salminen’s essays, that of cultural mix, cross-fertilization, overt impurity, and of liminal space. Gränsland (Borderland) 1984 deals with the threats and opportunities Finland is and has been exposed to, squeezed in between east and west. Minnet av Alexandria (Remembering Alexandria) 1988 widens the scope but the gist of the matter remains the same: the potentials of alterity, of foreign influence, even of marginality. Undret i Bagdad (The Baghdad miracle) 1997 and Islams två ansikten (The two faces of Islam) 2010 include further exercises in counterfactual thinking: e.g., what if the battle of Poitiers in 732 had ended in Arab victory?
Johannes Salminen as an essayist started out in the early sixties with a close look at Finland-Swedish positions in the country’s civil war of 1918. The subject obviously was a highly sensitive one, and backing up his case against onslaughts he honed his writing in the art of alternative reasoning. Salminen rapidly grew into a celebrated columnist and polemicist, but his main claim to fame rests on the deftly argued essay, more often than not with strong cosmopolitan underpinnings. It may look sardonic on the surface, because of opportunities lost, but there is something joyful about it because thinking makes it so.

Clas Zilliacus

Björnsson, Anders

Anders Björnsson was born in Stockholm in 1951. After academic studies in economic history in Stockholm and Gothenburg he worked first as a teacher, then as a producer at Sveriges Radio's science editorial office and then as a scientific employee at Svenska Dagbladet. He founded and was editor-in-chief of the fourteen-day magazine Dagens Forskning (2001–2003) and the international quarterly magazine Baltic Worlds (2008–2013).

Björnsson has published monographs in company, organisational and personal history. From 1997 to 2012, he was chairman of the Swedish Humanities Association. From time to time he has been a visiting professor at the School of Public Administration and in 2011 was appointed honorary doctor at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Gothenburg.

He has published several anthologies, collections of essays, thought books, translations (mainly from German) and has been active as a publishing editor. In 2013, he published a biography of ideas about Joseph Roth, Svindleriets ädla konst (The Noble Art of Fraud). In the spring of 2021, a collection of mini-essays on music will be published, När man inte hunsar (When you do not bully). He has initiated the Swedish History Days and the Contemporary History Institute (Södertörn University).

Dahlman, Eva

Eva Dahlman, born in Visby in 1947, is a Bachelor of Arts, photo historian, ethnologist and honorary doctor at Stockholm University. She lives in Stockholm and has been active at the Nordic Museum and the National Library of Sweden. Has been an independent photo historian since 2012 and is involved in museums and other cultural institutions as a lecturer.
Vice Chairman of the Center for Photography, a nationwide interest and member association for photographers and other professional groups active in photography. She is also a leading force in the network ”National responsibility for photography” in Sweden, which deals with questions about the history and future of the photographic still image.
Her research is particularly focused on female photographers and rural photography in Sweden. She is working on a book about women behind the camera in Sweden 1845 - 1945 and one about female photographers in Gotland. In 1991, Lotten von Düben. In Lapland was published, and in 2015 Exponerad tid - Johan Emanuel Thorins fotografier 1890 –1930 (Exposed Time - Johan Emanuel Thorin's photographs 1890 –1930, co-author Gunvor Vretblad). She has published about thirty photo-historical articles, both in Sweden and internationally.

Puide, Peeter

Born in Pärnu in 1938. Fled from the Red Army with his mother to Germany in 1944, then to Sweden in 1945. Puide holds a Bachelor of Science in Social Sciences from Stockholm University.

In his literary work Peeter Puide published three novel translations, seven collections of poems translated from Estonian and translated poetry from Estonian for Swedish Radio, Yle in Finland.

Together with Marianne Ahrne he made a film about concentration camps in Estonia 1941–44.

Between 1981 and 2004 he published two collections of poems and three own novels in Swedish, among them Till Bajkal, inte längre and Samuil Braschinskys försvunna vrede.

He received Svenska Dagbladet's literature prize in 1981.

Rahikainen, Agneta

Agneta Rahikainen, born in Sibbo, Uusimaa in 1962, has a PhD in Swedish Literature from Helsinki University. She lives in Helsinki and works as a Marketing Manager at The Society of Swedish Literature in Finland, responsible for promoting Finnish-Swedish literature in Finland and Sweden.
She is also a non-fiction author and she has published biographies about the writers Johan Ludvig and Fredrika Runeberg, Henry Parland and Edith Södergran. She also writes articles in different topics and book reviews in the Swedish non-fiction magazine Respons.
In recent years, she has been focusing mostly on illness in literature and visual art, especially tuberculosis and syphilis. Her next book will published under the title Smittans rike. Syfilis i konst, kultur och kropp, Natur & Kultur, Stockholm 2021.

Stam, Per

Per Stam was born in Vansbro, Sweden, in 1964 and holds a PhD in Literature from Uppsala University.
He has been editor in Chief at The Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University, and Research fellow at The Society of Swedish Literature in Finland, Helsinki.
His publications include: Introducción, in August Strindberg, Una mirada al Universo. Ensayos sobre alquimia, ciencias naturales, misticismo, fotografia y pintura, ed. Carles Magrinyà, 2016; Ed., Henry Parland, Sönder (om framkallning av Veloxpapper), 2005/2014; Ed., August Strindberg, Vivisektioner II, 2011