Description
To witness. To contain. To hunt.
The forests of Småland are home to a growing population of wild boar, once on the verge of extinction. They move in packs at night. Gardens are destroyed, farmland churned up. Yet their illusiveness draws in both visitors and inhabitants.
Ritve is making a pilgrimage from Finland to track them down. Council worker Glenn finds his quiet life disturbed by their night-time visits and his visions of apocalypse. Mia hopes her local history residency in the old primary school will help her grandfather recover his memory and voice.
Told by three people newly arrived in an isolated community, Wild Boar is a compelling and poetic debut from Finland-Swedish author Hannah Lutz about animals and people, their places in a changing ecosystem, and their capacities to grow and to destroy.
Praise for Wild Boar
‘Hypnotic, spare and poetic, this little award-winning book transports us to the forests of Sweden where wild boar are once again thriving. Three people are invested in their presence, and through the short chapters we witness how humans, wild creatures and nature interact – for good and bad. A beautifully achieved and tenderly translated treat.’ ~ Sainsbury’s Magazine
‘Hannah Lutz’s novel is an allegory of humanity’s plight in the age of impending climate catastrophe.’ ~ Sydsvenskan
‘In this thin little book, every page bursts with the paradoxes that surround man and nature today’ ~ Expressen
‘Startling and rich’ ~ Lucy Rose, author of The Lamb
‘Sparse, poetic and haunting, WILD BOAR follows three narrators in remote Sweden as they struggle to find meaning in a rapidly changing world. An understated, powerful fable about the power of nature, this is a compact seed of a book, one that keeps growing long after you’ve finished it.’ ~ Danielle Giles, author of Mere
‘Wild Boar is an extraordinary portrait of our relationships to nature in all their strangeness, complexity, and awe. Lutz’s focus on a local community and reintroduced native species resounds into the global and reminds us of our connectivity to the environment and to each other. It has left me reeling.’ ~ Elizabeth O’Connor, author of Whale Fall
‘This is certainly not a book to shout its intentions, but I was left with a profound sense of the difficulty we have in positioning ourselves, both personally and politically in relation to the natural world and our failures to live within it without causing harm. The incalculable sadness of that reality delivered without fanfare but all the more powerful for it.’ ~ Miranda Peake, poet and bookseller
‘A short, intense examination of the relationship between humanity and nature’ ~ David Hebblethwaite, European Literature Network
‘A concise, unpredictable and marvellously original fable of the anthropocene era’ ~ Alex Josephy, London Grip
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Hannah Lutz was born in 1984 and grew up in Ekenäs, in southern Finland. She has an MA from Finland’s Åbo Akademi University. She later moved to Denmark and attended the Writing School in Copenhagen. Still based in Denmark, she lives just outside Roskilde. Her short story ‘Den elfte versionen’ / ‘The Eleventh Version’ won the Umeå Short Story Award, Sweden, in 2011. Vildsvin / Wild Boar is Lutz’s debut novel. Written in Swedish, it was first published as the Danish translation in 2016 by Rosinante in Denmark; the original Swedish text was first published in 2017 by Förlaget in Finland and Albert Bonniers Förlag in Sweden. Her second novel, Selma, was published by Förlaget in Finland and Gutkind in Denmark in 2023.
Andy Turner is a writer, reviewer, translator, and former school teacher and examiner. He works with both Swedish and German and is a member of SELTA and the Translators Association of the Society of Authors. He graduated with an MA in Literary Translation from the University of East Anglia in 2017. He was Swedish mentee in the 2018-19 National Centre for Writing’s Emerging Literary Translator Mentorships Programme, working alongside Sarah Death. His translation of ‘Wild Boar’ by Hannah Lutz is his first full-length adult translation publication.
