Antiquity

‘Elegantly translated … [Antiquity] sets up a literary conversation with works such as Death in Venice and Nabokov’s Lolita. Like those novels, plot is secondary to the meticulous creation of a predator’s interior landscape. And the narrator of Antiquity is as compelling a problem as Humbert Humbert or Aschenbach – as with them, power and responsibility are inverted and sublimated into diaphanous aesthetics, confronting the reader with pointed questions about the nature of beauty, and of art’s power to do harm.’

– Cameron Woodhead and Steven Carroll * The Sydney Morning Herald *

‘While beautifully sensuous and unflinching in its depiction of all-consuming love, rarely has desire been painted with such dark desperation … Johansson’s voice is extraordinary and uniquely her own.’

– Mitchell Jordan * The Big Issue *

‘Hanna Johansson writes with astonishing precision … her ability to articulate feeling and sensation, both mental and physical, is unmatched. … [Antiquity] takes you slowly through a summer, and, despite yourself, you will let your feet drag and fix your eyes on the fascinatingly terrible thing in front of you.’

* Readings *

‘Entrancing and calamitous, Antiquity dreams deeply into the shadows of desire and obsession. A precise and mysterious spell of a book.’

– Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch

‘In Antiquity, Hanna Johansson probes the most forbidden recesses of desire, ageing, and memory in sentences as lucent and incisive as shards of glass. Wily, mesmeric, and utterly disarming, this fabulously translated novel held me captive from the very first page, and its questions and images will linger in my blood for a long time. Rarely have I felt so transported and beguiled by a book, let alone a debut. Don’t miss it.’

– Maggie Millner, author of Couplets: a love story

‘A wonderful novel written with the menacing elegance of a cat burglar working in the shadows and at great heights.’

– Catherine Lacey, author of Biography of X

‘Antiquity could have been a different, equally impressive novel, exploring its territories — queer familial and erotic longing, projection, the spectral lines of transgression — in the protective gear its sharp observations, meticulous intelligence, and gorgeous sentences would provide. Instead, what Hanna Johansson offers in her electric, unsettling debut refuses all protection and dares the reader to do the same. Kira Josefsson’s translation is its own marvel, the language brimming with just-kept chaos until the keeping’s no longer possible, the feeling’s just too big. I won’t forget this book or its aftermath: a confusion, a consternation, an explanation that is not an explanation, a story open at both ends.’

– Anna Moschovakis, author of Participation

Hanna Johansson began her writing career as a critic and essayist covering topics like fashion, literature, art, and performance, and currently works as the art editor at the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. Her debut novel, Antiquity, was awarded the Katapultpriset Prize in 2021.

Kira Josefsson is a writer and translator working between English and Swedish. She is the recipient of grants from the PEN/Heim Translation Fund and the Swedish Arts Council. She writes about the intersection of politics, literature, and identity for both Swedish and English-language publications.