Barndom: Childhood

With a foreword by Kerstin Ekman. Kerstin Ekman is primarily known as a novelist, but she has occasionally turned to free verse, especially when the subject is autobiographical. In 1993-1994, Swedish TV 1 conducted a series of talks with prominent writers under the rubric 'Seven Boys and Seven Girls'. In place of an ordinary interview, Kerstin Ekman read aloud the poem published here. The poem, which appeared for the first time in Swedish Book Review in 1995, is here published with original photographs kindly provided by the author. The prose passages are quotations from Ekman's 1988 novel Rövarna i Skuleskogen (The Forest of Hours).