My name is Fanny Klang and I am the author of the novel Closed Institution. For it I was awarded last year’s Robespierre Prize. Today I have the great honour of giving a speech to the recipient of the 2025 Robespierre Prize, which goes to Andi Olluri, writer, author and activist.
Andi, you were born in 2002 and are already behind a solid collection of texts with a very wide range. At 21, you wrote the book Beyond Ukraine, you have published several extremely readable texts in the magazine Parabol and you contribute a well-written essay to Myrdaliana volume two, which comes out today. You do not shy away from any subject and can seemingly write about most things that are relevant to our time – everything from how the fast-food industry and the pharmaceutical industry affect public health, to Sweden’s entry into NATO, which you so aptly describe as an offensive alliance.
A recurring theme in your texts is the double standards of the West and the mass media. The most prominent example, which you have addressed in several of your texts, is how the war in Ukraine has been treated and portrayed, compared to Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians.
You have written a very clarifying essay in Parabol, with a sharp analysis of Dagens Nyheter’s double standards when it comes to reporting on Ukraine and Palestine. You explain that this apparent double standard is due to a simple fact: Russia is the enemy while Israel is an ally.
You also write about the student protests in May 2024, a topic that is particularly close to my heart, since I myself was involved in the tent protests at Stockholm University, while you were at Gothenburg University. This is also a clear example of double standards, this time from the universities – they were very quick to end all academic collaborations with Russia, but when it comes to boycotting Israel, it is suddenly not the task of the universities to be political, something that in itself may seem deeply political.
In your texts you demonstrate clarity, insight and overall understanding of the system. One of your most thorough works to date is your contribution to Myrdaliana volume two. There we find your initiated review of the Swedish media’s complicity in Israel’s genocide in Palestine. Everyone who reads the newspaper knows that the mantra that “Israel has the right to defend itself” has been repeated day in and day out on the editorial pages of the major newspapers in recent years. But the question of whether occupiers have the right to self-defence against those they illegally occupy is conspicuous by its absence. In your review it appears that the Palestinians’ right to self-defence, the Palestinians’ right to armed resistance, is only mentioned in a single one of 19,000 reviewed articles from the national media. These are breathtaking figures. If you want to read the essay in its entirety, which I highly recommend, it can be found in Myrdaliana volume two, as I said.
A few weeks ago, I read an article in the Norwegian Klassekampen, by Ali Esbati. Esbati writes that the five richest men in the world are involved in controlling the media, from X to Facebook and the Washington Post, and he formulates it as: “The super-rich are buying control over the dominant narrative about society”. In Sweden, we can see in parallel that media support is decreasing sharply, and overall, the result is that the perspectives that can be taken into account are becoming fewer and fewer.
You, Andi Olluri, are a refreshing and necessary counterbalance to this development. The present is in great need of your scrutinizing gaze, and it is more important than ever to have people who dare to question the angles, methods and rhetoric of the established media.
The fact that you are not very old is actually irrelevant: the texts you have written would have been absolutely excellent regardless of who had given rise to them, but I must admit that it feels very promising that at twenty-three you already have such a sharp intellect, such a refreshing social criticism and the great courage required to position yourself outside the comfortable confines of the editorial pages.
Andi Olluri – big congratulations on the 2025 Robespierre Prize. A worthy laureate.