Åsa Larsson Wins Prestigious Award

It has just been announced that Åsa Larsson is the winner of the prestigious German Radio Bremen Crime Prize for The Sins of Our Fathers, the latest and final novel of her Rebecka Martinsson Series.

Here is the jury’s motivation:

“With her six-volume series about Swedish prosecutor Rebecka Martinsson, Åsa Larsson succeeds in portraying Swedish society in a way that is not at all as rural and idyllic as one might think. The environment, nature, and climate are never mere backdrops in Åsa Larsson’s crime novels. Rather, she recognizes them as a basic requirement and also as a characteristic of the extraordinary life in the far north of Sweden. She conveys impressive imagery of snowfall in May and dangerous paths over thawing ice, as well as mysterious crime scenes. Nothing is just black and white with Åsa Larsson, and her characters are multi-layered and always believable: from the successful boxer who wants to find out who killed his beloved father decades ago, to the investigator herself, the prosecutor Rebecka Martinsson, who is always plagued by (self-)doubts.”

The Radio Bremen Crime Prize was established in 2001 and is considered one of the most prestigious awards for crime fiction in Germany. Åsa, whose books have been on the German bestseller lists for months, will travel to Germany to accept the award at a ceremony on September 27th. She will also follow up with a reading tour across Germany.

The Sins of Our Fathers was published in Germany on March 28th by C. Bertelsmann.