La vera storia del pirata Long John Silver by Björn Larsson

Amongst its most successful authors are Arto Paasilinna, whose L’anno della lepre ( Jäniksen vuosi) has sold over 110,000 copies, and Björn Larsson, who has reached 120,000 copies with La vera storia del pirata Long John Silver. In addition to the literature of Scandinavian countries (Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland, including the ancient mediaeval sagas) Iperborea publishes authors from the Netherlands, Estonia and Finland. As Iperborea was fundamentally the first publishing house in Italy to explore this field of literature, it had great freedom of choice, and the possibility of selecting the best authors, including the classics, Nobel prizewinners, unpublished or retranslated works, and the most important voices in contemporary fiction.

She wasn’t the only publisher working in this area, but in Italy there was just one other, named Lindau, a small publishing house in Turin, but its few titles quickly disappeared from bookshelves. After few years the Iperborea catalogue was full of the most important Nordic authors. In October 1987 she founded Iperborea and went to her first Frankfurt Book Fair with a list of the first 15 titles she had loved in France.

Back in Italy, she realized she could no longer read those wonderful authors simply because they were not published. She discovered the great Scandinavian classics (Strindberg and Ibsen, who are constantly staged in theatres both in France and Italy, and also less familiar authors such as Selma Lagerlöf and Pär Lagerkvist) and, little by little, contemporary writers who were beginning to be translated in France at that time (at the beginning of the 1980s). Tolkien, then through her passion for Karen Blixen. It was founded by Emilia Lodigiani in 1987, with the aim of promoting Northern European literature and culture in Italy. Emilia discovered Scandinavian literature during her ten-year stay in Paris, first through her studies on J.R.R. An example is provided by Iperborea, a publishing house based in Milano.

But in actual fact, the geography of mankind includes vast tracts of uncharted intellectual territory waiting for a pioneer. One could imagine that after millennia of civilization and with billions of people living on the globe, that there is not much left to explore.

La vera storia del pirata Long John Silver by Björn Larsson