The moderator is the Icelandic author Einar Kárason. The interview is in Swedish/Scandinavian.
KJELL WESTÖ (1961) is a Finland-Swedish writer, who has written both poetry and short stories, but is best known for his novels, which are set in his hometown and where the history of Finland is the background everything unfolds against. His breakthrough novel Drakarna över Helsingfors (‘Kites over Helsinki‘) was published in 1996. He has since written several novels and received the Finlandia Prize in 2006 for his multi-generational novel Där vi en gång gått (‘Where once we walked‘), which was made into a film with the same title.
In 2013 his novel Hägring 38 was published, which in 2016 came out in English as The Wednesday Club. It takes place during a few months in 1938, when tendencies that would become clear during World War II can already be identified, while the Finnish Civil War of 1918 casts its long shadow over the novel´s characters. For this book, Westö was awarded the Nordic Council Literature Prize 2014.