Purity

2021 Nordic Council Literature Prize Finalist
The stories in Purity take the reader through cities and suburbs, apartments and streets, to find characters struggling to survive in modern society: a man has an outburst on a bus; a fugitive finds insight in a color wheel; a social realist kills his friend with a hammer; a thief finds himself in books. And cleaners reluctantly go on cleaning.
With gravity and humor, against the backdrop of a violent civilization, people are depicted as fallen, or waiting to fall, rendered by Tichý with the fury, compassion and emotional complexity of Kendrick Lamar.

Andrzej Tichý (b. 1978) was born in Prague to a
Polish mother and a Czech father and has lived in Sweden since 1981. He is the
author of five novels, a story collection and a wide range of nonfiction and
criticism. Tichý has received critical acclaim for his work, and is widely
recognized as one of the most important novelists of his generation. His novel Wretchedness,
a post-political foray into modern day Swedish society, won the 2021
Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize, and was longlisted for the 2021 International Booker
Prize and shortlisted for the 2021 Bernard Shaw Prize. His latest short story
collection Purity was nominated for the Nordic Council Literary
Prize.

Nichola Smalley is a translator of Swedish and
Norwegian literature. Her translation of Andrzej Tichý’s novel Wretchedness
won the 2021 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize, and was longlisted for the 2021
International Booker Prize and shortlisted for the 2021 Bernard Shaw Prize. She
has a PhD in the use of slang in contemporary Swedish and English literature.