Strega | by Johanne Lykke Holm
Strega | by Johanne Lykke Holm
Translated from Swedish by Saskia Vogel
Winner of the 2023 Bernard Shaw Prize
Winner of an English PEN Award
Nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize
Shortlisted for the European Union Prize for Literature
Powerfully inventive and atmospheric, Strega is a modern gothic story of nine young women on the cusp of inheriting society’s submission to violence, and the age-long myths that uphold it
With little boxes of liquorice, hairbands, and notebooks in her bag, Rafa arrives at the remote Alpine town of Strega to work at the grand Olympic Hotel. There, she and eight other girls receive the stiff uniforms of seasonal workers and are taught to iron, cook, and make the beds by austere matrons. In spare moments between tasks, the girls start to enjoy each other’s company as they pick herbs in the garden, read in the library, and take in the scenery. But when the hotel suddenly fills with people for a raucous party, one of the girls disappears. What follows are deeper revelations about the myths young women are told, what they are raised to expect from the world, the violence they are made to endure, and, ultimately, the question of whether a gentler, more beautiful life is possible.
A monument to long-dead maids and their shrouded knowledge, Johanne Lykke Holm’s luminescent and jagged prose, delivered in Saskia Vogel’s incisive translation, resonates like a spell that keeps exerting its powers long after reading.
Publication 1 November 2022
Description 210 × 138 mm, 183 pages, hardcover
ISBN 978-1-9196092-2-5
Design Ateljé Grotesk
Download AI sheet
JOHANNE LYKKE HOLM (b. 1987) is an author and translator. Nominated for both the Nordic Council Literature Prize and the European Union Prize for Literature, she is establishing herself among the most promising up-and-coming literary authors in Sweden. She has also translated Yahya Hassan, Josefine Klougart, and Hiromi Itō into Swedish.
SASKIA VOGEL is an author and translator from Los Angeles, now living in Berlin. Permission (2019), her debut novel, was published in five languages and longlisted for the Believer Book Award. The Swedish edition was translated by Johanne Lykke Holm. She is Princeton University’s Fall 2022 Translator in Residence.
Praise for Strega
In this novel, all evocations are like whispered secrets. From sentence to sentence, the obvious is always withheld amid a disquieting, ambient fog in which the principal struggle is to locate oneself
– The Irish Times
This is a sensuous tale of violence. Holm conjures a world of heady scents that is both supernatural and hyper-real [and] delivers a book that whispers a dark truth felt by many women
– The Spectator
Elegiac… Lykke Holm’s prose – full of litanies of strange and striking imagery – is, without a doubt, the book’s greatest strength
– Kirkus
Transfixing… A thought-provoking fairy tale for our flawed patriachal world. Vogel’s propulsive, incantatory translation is driven by hypnotic anaphora and punctuated by innumerable poetic gems
– Star Tribune
A novel that consumes, that interrupts its reader’s present… Holm’s world is one of richness, of allegory, where blood and milk and mold are common, recurring substances, and color is used generously like an impasto painting… [W]hen you close Strega, you continue to feel its presence
– Los Angeles Review of Books
Stylish and spellbinding… Readers won’t be able to turn away from this gorgeous and captivating work
– Publishers Weekly
The enigma of Strega is unsolvable because it’s not a mystery. It’s the result of centuries of voices hushed and knuckles white, of accepted and expected violence. A world restricted to the implied, the veiled sob, the cloistered tut
– The Anarchist Review of Books
Captures the nausea-inducing anxiety of awaiting the worst… Holm embraces the slow build to a horrific reveal with skill
– PopSugar
A fever dream meditation on girlhood, female friendships and unnamed dangers… Strega is riveting: surreal, ominous [and] sharp in its observations about the harms that girls submit to when they become women
– Shelf Awareness
Holm masterfully uses imagery and symbolism, offering a modern Gothic allegory of the often degrading treatment of and expectations placed on young women
– Booklist
A work of mythic reinvention about the power of girls coming of age in a world hellbent on containing their passions and imaginations… Strega left me breathless, angry, and then thrilled by the dare it leaves in the reader's lap
– Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Thrust and The Chronology of Water
Utterly immersive, Strega is a modern-day fairy tale in the primeval sense, a visceral, hallucinatory allegory of coming into womanhood. It’s at once timeless and completely new, with surprising and evocative prose – a glittering translation of a masterful work
– Julia Fine, author of The Upstairs House and What Should Be Wild
If Fleur Jaeggy and Shirley Jackson had ever spent the night together in The Shining Hotel, their love child might have been Strega. As it was, this Strega came into the world through a different yet equally miraculous union: that of a writer and a translator of extraordinary talent. Its hypnotic, off-kilter prose dances the reader into a state of gloried frenzy, pressing the sometimes-nightmarish buttons of imagined memory as it probes the essence of being young, searching, and exploited
– Polly Barton, translator and author of Fifty Sounds
Strega is a charm: its vivid details work eerie magic. In sumptuous, prickly prose, Johanne Lykke Holm unsettles and astonishes her reader
– Isobel Wohl, author of Cold New Climate
Strega is the kind of book Lolita would write if she wrote like Thomas Mann. This book is sprawling with heart-shaped mirrors in wet grass, peach-coloured bedding, neon lights, knives. All the paraphernalia of patriarchal violence. Johanne Lykke Holm is from the school of Fleur Jaeggy and Frank Wedekind, she uses the young women as her stage and transports you to another world, where everything is scenography. As uncompromising and brilliant as she is disturbing, I am forever devoted to the cult of her
– Olga Ravn, author of The Employees
The prose is a treasure to explore. No one can fail to see its beauty. Strega is a shield of 180 pages. And behind it? A slow-acting poison. A spell, a rite of passage, a black diamond
– Göteborgs-Posten
‘I knew that a woman’s life can be turned into a crime scene at any moment,’ explains the protagonist early on in the book, giving the reader an indication of the violence to come… The female world that Lykke Holm depicts is remarkable and enchanting... When the maids’ hair spill over the sheets ‘like spilled ink’ I stand defeated, by great beauty and grief
– Dagens Nyheter
A beautiful, increasingly suspenseful brew with great semantic variety and European erudition… Read it. Surrender. And adapt it to film!
– Expressen
Not Faking Utopia is a film portrait of Johanne Lykke Holm with images of paintings by Ida Sønder Thorhauge who painted the cover for the German edition of Strega.
Not Faking Utopia is a film by Ann Kathrin Doerig.
Director of photography, sound & post production by Benedikt Schnermann.
With music from Tom Hessler.
German subtitles by Cora Lorbeer.
Graphic design by Marco Jann.
Thanks to our friends at AKI-Verlag for allowing us to share the video here.