Per Nilsson was born in 1954 in Malmö. He now lives in Sölvesborg, a small village on the edge of the Baltic Sea. He is married to Åsa and has four children.He worked as a teacher in music and mathematics but has been a full-time author since 1999.
Per Nilsson writes books for children and teenagers and he wants to write about Important Things, which is also the title of one of his books.The narrative technique in his novels is often a unique combination of traditional epic story-telling and a film-like structure.
What matters the most in Per Nilssons books is the relationship between human beings. He can tell the story about love and one will feel as if it is the first time one has ever read about it.He can combine fairy tale and thriller and there is always a subtle undercurrent.He writes about everyday life and adventures, about reality and about dreams.
”I think that I saw the authorship as an impossible dream when I was young. I have always been a reader, I have always loved to play with words, with language, to put stories together, but still – it was no more than a dream. But I started writing anyway. I wrote to tell my kids about me as a child, ‘Dad, before he became Dad’, and I told them about an eleven-twelve year old who was walking around in Malmö with his head full of daydreams and fantasies and who,time and again,bumped into the harsh reality. That was me. And that’s why I started writing for young people, and that’s what I want to do most of all.I think about my books as letters. I want to keep up a dialogue. About life and death, about hope and trust in the future, about the roles that we play,about the world we live in,and about love. Most of all I want to speak to somebody who is sixteen years old. Or thirteen or twenty. But I don’t write for everybody. I write books for those who have their heads full of dreams and fantasies and who bump into the lamp posts of reality, over and over again, those who try to understand how it all fits together, those who know that those are not like the others, for those who cry in pitch black despair,and for those that laugh and know that the world is beautiful and that life is an adventure. I don’t write for everybody. I write for you.”
Per Nilsson
List of Publications – A Selection
1992 Hjärtans fröjd/Hearts Delight
1993 Ja må han le…va?/Happy Bir…What?
1994 Korpens sång/The Song of the Raven
1996 Anarkai
1998 du&du&du/You&You&You
2000 Ett annat sätt att vara ung/Another Way of Being Young
2002 Sjutton/Seventeen
2003 Ask och Embla/Askr and Embla
2004 Solprinsen/The Sun Prince
2006 Svenne
Translated into: Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faeroese, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Kurdish, Norwegian
AWARDS
1994 Nomination for the August Prize for Korpens sång
1997 First Prize in Rabén & Sjögren’s competition for the best book for young adults on the subject of love for Hjärtans fröjd
1997 The Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis for Hjärtans fröjd
1998 Nomination for the August Prize for du&du&du
1999 The Zilveren Zoen for Hjärtans fröjd
1999 The Astrid Lindgren Prize
2000 Nomination for the August Prize for Ett annat sätt att vara ung
2002 Nomination for the August Prize for Sjutton
