History is a Music Box | Channa Riedel | Granta

History is a Music Box

Channa Riedel

Translated by Sarah Death

‘My hands are cupped around the names written on the tablets of stone.’

Channa Riedel

Channa Riedel is a writer, poet and musician. She recently graduated from the Academy of Music and Drama, University of Gothenburg, and the debut album of her band Beloveds was released in 2019. This year she will begin a master’s in Literary Composition at HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design, and is currently working on her first collection of poems.  

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Translated by Sarah Death

Sarah Death has translated Swedish literature of many periods and genres, including works by Lena Andersson, Kerstin Ekman, Selma Lagerlöf, Astrid Lindgren, Sven Lindqvist, Göran Rosenberg and Steve Sem-Sandberg. Her most recent translation was Letters from Tove, the correspondence of Finland-Swedish author and artist Tove Jansson. She has twice won the George Bernard Shaw Prize for translation from Swedish, and in 2014 received the Royal Order of the Polar Star for services to Swedish literature. In autumn 2019, she was partnered with young writer Channa Riedel to participate in the Jewish Book Week/Beit Venezia Writers in Translation Project.

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