It's review day, she herself has only read two, but the criticism is overwhelmingly brilliant. The successes with "Eufori" certainly made her "rise to the sky" she says, but that doesn't mean she felt pressured in the work with the new novel.
As an author, one is not part of the dramaturgy that media logic deals with, oneself is only in a development phase all the time, and in writing.
Sorrow
For her Sylvia Plath story, Elin Cullhed received the August Prize and both a national and international breakthrough. But she was also struck by sorrow. However alive Sylvia Plath may have become in her novel, she could not undo the American author's suicide.
For me, it became a crushing insight that Sylvia Plath still dies on the other side of my book, no matter how much I had engaged, it's what happens and that insight I had to live with myself in my life and feel the pain.
"The Mire"
Fighting young women are her literary theme. In "Eurydikes natt" Karin is just about to enter "her big strong life" when she is struck by the catastrophe: a brutal and gross rape at the first high school party she has surprisingly been invited to.
Previously, I have been very focused on writing out the enormous power of resistance, but in the new book I wanted to ask the question "what's it like down there in the darkness, in the mire?" This time I wrote from a different state.
Elin Cullhed wanted to explore the "condition of love" for a young woman, she says, and bring out Eurydike's story in a myth that otherwise exclusively deals with Orfeus. In the novel, he is named Alfred and is struck by a revolutionary infatuation.
But somewhere it's more important to him how he becomes a man among men than how he is true in his love.
Born: 1983.
Books: Made her debut in 2016 with the novel "Gudarna" about Bita, Lilly, and Jane in Tierp. Received the August Prize in 2021 for "Eufori - a novel about Sylvia Plath" which has been published in 26 countries.
From the reviews of "Eurydikes natt":
"It shouldn't work, but it does. The characters in 'Eurydikes natt' are, as they say, complex. Their turbulent inner lives pour out over the pages", writes Katja Palo in Göteborgs-Posten.
"Reading Elin Cullhed's new novel is to meet, not stereotypes, but individuals you believe in and engage with", writes Ingrid Elam in Dagens Nyheter.
