Jan Myrdal’s big prize – the Lenin Award for 2024 goes to Martin Hägglund

Martin Hägglund

“With the deepest knowledge, prophetic seriousness and supreme philosophical overview, Martin Hägglund in his monumental work "This Life – Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom" fixes his gaze on the morally decisive life questions for us humans about the meaning of existence in a self-evident yet completely new way. Like a contemporary inquisitive Socrates, this socialist and teacher of wisdom accompanies us on a journey through the history of literature and philosophy and with examples from these wells of human experience and multi-thousand-year traditions builds an astonishingly beautiful and artistic cathedral of thought and hopeful utopia about what we for our own and for everyone else's sake should, can and must do with the dizzyingly short moment we wander around on this earth. Never has the beautiful gospel of liberty, equality and fraternity been embodied more fully, consistently, and vigorously.”

Read all about the award ceremony in Varberg 9 November here!

The Lenin Award

“A kick in the nuts aimed at the powers that be”. That’s how Lasse Diding describes the purpose of Jan Myrdal's big prize – the Lenin Award that’s awarded every year to an author or artist in Sweden, who operates with social criticism and in a rebellious leftist tradition. With the prize money amounting to 100,000 SEK, the Lenin Award is one of the bigger cultural awards in Sweden – and without a shadow of a doubt the most contentious! Jan Myrdal's small prize – the Robespierre Prize amounts to 25,000 SEK and should reward a young Swedish writer or artist, who operates in a critical spirit.