“The human ecologist, Marxist and activist Andreas Malm has, with his life at stake in the era of racism, imperialist wars, Palestinian genocide and climate disasters, with his burning intellectual courage and uncompromising integrity, become an absolutely decisive Swedish voice in the world. For more than 20 years, he has in an increasing and to an equal degree in theory and practice through internationally groundbreaking research on global warming and the role of fossil fuels in this apocalyptic doom saga of capitalism and through his own personal involvement in climate and solidarity movements all over the world, inspired activists as well as the world’s leading academics, researchers and free intellectuals, and no other Swede can with the same self-evident certainty accept a prize in both Jan Myrdal’s and Lenin’s names.”
Jan Myrdal’s big prize – the Lenin Award is awarded by Lasse Diding to an author or artist in Sweden, who operates with social criticism and in a rebellious leftist tradition. The prize money is SEK 100,000. The award ceremony will take place at Varberg Theatre on Saturday 15 November 2025 at 13 and the day of celebration ends with a party at Hotell Gästis in Varberg.
Jan Myrdal’s big prize – the Lenin Award was established in 2009 and previous laureates are Mattias Gardell, Roy Andersson, Maj Wechselmann, Sven Lindqvist, Maj Sjöwall, Jan Guillou, Mikael Wiehe, Mikael Nyberg, Stefan Jarl, Sven Wollter, Göran Therborn, Kajsa Ekis Ekman, Nina Björk, Carl-Göran Ekerwald, Karl Ove Knausgård and Martin Hägglund.
Born in 1977, Andreas Malm became involved in the syndicalist youth movement at an early age and worked at Arbetaren from 2002 to 2009. Active early on in the struggle for the freedom of Palestine, in 2002 he published the book Bulldozers Against a People – About the Occupation of Palestine and the Swedish Betrayal based on personal experiences from working to defend the Palestinians in the West Bank. Two years later, When Capital Takes up Arms – About Imperialism in Our Time was published, which immediately made him a well-known Marxist and anti-colonial theorist in Sweden.
After books about hatred of Muslims and about Iran and its modern labor movement, Malm began to discuss the climate issue from 2006 onwards, but also to participate in direct acts of disobedience to raise awareness about the greenhouse effect. In 2009, Malm became a doctoral student in Lund in an interdisciplinary project on the role of fossil fuels in capital accumulation, a work that in 2016 resulted in the thesis Fossil Capital, which immediately gained classic status in the international climate discussion and Malm is subsequently referred to in an obvious way by greats such as Naomi Klein and Sally Rooney. The book was followed up the following year with The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World, another epoch-making work in which Malm cleans house with postmodernist climate theory based on his Marxist materialist basic view. His 2021 publication How to Blow Up a Pipeline quickly became a standard work among climate activists and translated into a number of languages, has also become an international bestseller that has emerged as a source of inspiration wherever the climate movement has gone from words to action.
Among the books written by Malm are his recently published account of the genocide in Gaza, The Destruction of Palestine is the Destruction of the Earth from 2025, and Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown from 2024 in collaboration with fellow researcher Wim Carton, the sequel of which is expected this fall. These are books that are read and discussed worldwide by the leading researchers in their respective disciplines.
Malm works as a university lecturer in Lund at the Department of Human Ecology while also being a member of the editorial board of the London-based Historical Materialism, the world’s leading Marxist journal in the field, as well as in the management of Verso, the world’s leading book publisher with a clear left-wing profile.
Iran on the Brink: Rising Workers and Threats of War, with Shora Esmailian, 2007.
Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, 2016.
The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World, 2017.
Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century, 2020.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline, 2021.
White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism, with The Zetkin Collective, 2021.
Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, with Wim Carton, 2024.
The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth, 2025.
The Long Heat: Climate politics when it’s too late, with Wim Carton, out 7 October 2025.
