Saskia Vogel
Saskia Vogel is a writer and translator from Los Angeles, now living in Berlin. Her debut novel Permission was published in five languages. The Swedish edition was translated by Johanne Lykke Holm. Vogel has translated over twenty fiction, poetry, and non-fiction titles from Swedish into English, including works by Linnea Axelsson, Johanne Lykke Holm, Balsam Karam, Karolina Ramqvist, Steve Sem-Sandberg, Lina Wolff and Jessica Schiefauer, whose Girls Lost was a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize. Her translation of Johannes Anyuru’s They Will Drown in Their Mothers’ Tears won the Firecracker Award for fiction. Vogel’s writing has been awarded the Berlin Senate Endowment for Non-German Literature and longlisted for the Believer Book Award and the Pushcart Prize. She was Princeton University’s Fall 2022 Translator in Residence. You can read her work in the New Yorker, LitHub, the New York Times, the White Review, the Offing, Elsewhere and elsewhere. Photograph © Fette Sans
Publications
Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner?
Katrine Marçal
Translated by Saskia Vogel
Adam Smith, the founder of modern economics, believed that our actions stem from self-interest and the world turns because of financial gain. But every night Adam Smith’s mother served him his dinner, not out of self-interest but out of love.Today, economics focuses on self-interest and excludes our other motivations. It disregards the unpaid work of mothering, caring, cleaning and cooking and its influence has spread from the market to how we shop, think and date. In this engaging takedown of the economics that has failed us, Katrine Marçal journeys from Adam Smith’s dinner table to the recent financial crisis and shows us how different, how much better, things could be.
Saskia Vogel on Granta.com
Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition
Beyond Deep Throat | Part II
Saskia Vogel
‘Whatever porn is or is not, like dance it is rooted in the body.’
Saskia Vogel on the relationship between dance and pornography.
Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition
Beyond Deep Throat | Part I
Saskia Vogel
‘The eye wants to see its fill, the I wants to see how it feels.’
Saskia Vogel on the foundational stories of pornography.
Essays & Memoir | Issue 161
Siblings
Karolina Ramqvist
‘I asked her why she hadn’t told me I had a sister before, and she said she’d thought it was for my father to tell, since she was his child.’
Karolina Ramqvist on finding her estranged siblings, translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel.
Fiction | The Online Edition
Strega
Johanne Lykke Holm
‘I knew a woman’s life could at any point be turned into a crime scene.’
An excerpt from Strega.
In Conversation | The Online Edition
In Conversation
Saskia Vogel & Jen Calleja
‘Narrative is control, dominance, purposeful withholding, flirting’
Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition
A Woman Screaming
Saskia Vogel
‘I realized that neither revenge nor compulsive storytelling would release me from this pain.’
Fiction | The Online Edition
The Polyglot Lovers
Lina Wolff
‘When we were sixteen years old, I broke Johnny’s nose with the back of my hand.’
Fiction | The Online Edition
Acts of Infidelity
Lena Andersson
‘Anticipation made it difficult for Ester to swallow.’ Translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel.
In Conversation | The Online Edition
Lina Wolff | Podcast
Lina Wolff & Saskia Vogel
Lina Wolff on Dante, the artistic temperament and the tension she feels between a ‘Spanishness’ and ‘Swedishness’ when writing.
Fiction | Issue 124
Nuestra Señora de la Asunción
Lina Wolff
‘No one here is normal except you, and you’re not even from Spain.’
In Conversation | Issue 124
Granta Sweden | Interview
Johanna Haegerström & Saskia Vogel
‘If there are any tensions between Swedish writers it has more to do with style: writers who incline towards a more classical, epic storytelling versus writers who engage in more experimental uses of language.’
In Conversation | Issue 124
Tahmima Anam | Podcast
Tahmima Anam & Saskia Vogel
An interview with Tahmima Anam, one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists.
In Conversation | Issue 124
Sarah Hall | Podcast
Sarah Hall & Saskia Vogel
Sarah Hall speaks to Saskia Vogel about wolves, tattoos and the wilds of Cumbria.
In Conversation | Issue 124
Tania James | Interview
Tania James & Saskia Vogel
‘Write the story that unsettles and excites you, that keeps you coming back to your desk.’
In Conversation | Issue 124
Jeanette Winterson | Podcast
Jeanette Winterson & Saskia Vogel
Jeanette Winterson reads from her new memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal, and her story ‘All I Know About Gertrude Stein’ from Granta 115: The F Word.
In Conversation | Issue 124
Urvashi Butalia | Interview
Urvashi Butalia & Saskia Vogel
‘Feminist movements everywhere in the world are born of the particular political and economic realities of the places where they exist.’
In Conversation | Issue 124
Ben Okri | Interview
Ben Okri & Saskia Vogel
‘Whenever we use the word beauty or we feel it, it comes from a sense of something indefinable.’
In Conversation | Issue 124
Three Questions for Nicole Krauss
Nicole Krauss & Saskia Vogel
‘It’s easy to make an argument for the importance of literature in general, but almost impossible to sustain any conviction about the specific value of one’s own work.’
In Conversation | Issue 124
Bani Abidi | Interview
Bani Abidi & Saskia Vogel
‘I prefer to engage with things I may or may not find important at my own discretion, and feel a bit throttled by the world’s anxious curiosity about Pakistan.’