When we are to present the 2025 Jan Myrdal’s big prize – the Lenin Award to Andreas Malm today, it is the 17th time we have given out this award, and we can look back on its history with pride and some wonder. When Jan Myrdal himself gave the speeches to the laureates during the first 10 years, he returned time and again to the image of a handfan that each year represented an increasingly broader spectrum of intellectual and artistic experiences that nevertheless represented in a concentrated form what he himself wanted to achieve with his life’s work.
One summer day in 2008, in order to present some ideas, I had taken Jan on a forest walk in the area of Skinnskatteberg, where he had moved with his life partner Gun Kessle 10 years earlier. He was immediately positive about my first proposal to create a literary society in his name with the task of passing on both his intellectual works and the material in the form of his enormous library to future generations. He was also positive about the second proposal for a prize in his name, and he also wanted the name of the prize to include the decisive figure in the enormous 20th century attempt to abolish war and class injustice, symbolized by the name Lenin.
Jan had been shaped by the experiences of the French Revolution as analysed by Karl Marx and the workers’ movement that subsequently strove to abolish the contemporary system that Jan came to see as unnecessary. He believed that another world was actually possible.
In his 75-year writing deed, which many of us 68ers greedily absorbed, he not only analysed the background to the then rapidly escalating resistance struggle in Indochina and Palestine, but he always strived to provide the broad historical picture of the history of class societies, with particular emphasis on the anti-colonial struggle of the last 400 years across our globe, directed against the West’s dreams of empire and attempts at civilization. Anti-imperialism had merged with anti-capitalism and anti-fascism, which during Jan’s childhood and youth found its focus in the great anti-fascist war, where the Soviet Union, at the cost of enormous sacrifices, managed to defeat evil itself and give the continued anti-colonial struggle new courage and a sense of victory. At the age of 22, he was able to witness Mao’s decisive work of liberation in China, and for Jan the right to rebel remained a cornerstone throughout his life.
At the age of 30, he received from his American writer friend Richard Wright the prediction that the great class conflicts of the future would be hidden in race and religion, which the aging Jan believed had proven all too true. This would also characterize Jan’s studies and writing for the rest of his life, as racism and, above all, Islamophobia became fundamental elements in the ideological class war against the people of the world. In this way, education and humanism also became a crucial foundation for Jan with his constant striving to go to the newspaper files and read the classics in order to wrest power over the laws of thought from the hands of his opponents.
In this lifelong political writing of Jan’s, he came to use all the means available to him and the decisive thing for him was in every situation the political effect and power he believed he could achieve. As a fiction writer, he advocated a fabulating realism where all artistic tricks were permitted when reality was to be twisted into fiction and all the characters of class society were to be portrayed and stripped down in satire and burlesque but also in everyday objectifying realism and in the most deeply personal first-person books with himself as the primary human object of study, a genre he carried on from Strindberg and which has today become one of our foremost. With travelogues, but also in report books with sociological perspectives from rarely seriously depicted Asian cultures, he opened the world to his Western readers and in profound literary historical exposés he demonstrated to us younger people other often forgotten literary traditions than those prevailing and dominant among us. His dialectical view of the surrounding reality meant that he preferred to clarify contradictions in polemical debate and dramatized form and both his radio plays and short essays in the form of “writing positions” came to form their own genres when he had these later published in 21 volumes throughout his life.
In addition, he created film history with The Grafter and together with Gun Kessle he saw classical art, photography and caricature with his own very special class struggle eyes. That he also wanted to live fully he showed by combining political activism with an almost immoderate love for food, wine, music and love life, all carefully reported and analysed in his written works. He always courageously and refractorily followed his own path against the power and just as obviously he sometimes got lost and sometimes put his foot in it because otherwise he would not be a human being. We have always been looking for laureates who in different ways reflected these Jan’s aspirations and when we now look back at the 16 chosen so far and Andreas Malm who will today receive Jan Myrdal’s big prize – the Lenin Award, we can probably conclude that many of them have had different opinions and taken different positions than Jan on many issues, but that they have nevertheless somehow been on the same path and largely had the same direction. That is probably why they have all been so chastised in unison by the megaphones of power.
Let us take a rhapsodic look at Jan’s fan of laureates and how each of them has in different ways made the path towards a different, better future a little wider and stronger without ever forgetting where they are headed.
2009 Mattias Gardell
This professor of religious studies with an anti-colonial focus on racism and Islamophobia is also a political activist and one of the initiators of Ship to Gaza and a very present voice in public discourse with roots in a completely different part of the left than Jan. He immediately showed great courage as the first recipient of the Lenin Award, as this could have directly hindered his academic career in a number of different ways. This first prize gave rise to a media shitstorm that Mattias handled with supreme coolness and scientific calm.
2010 Roy Andersson
Our second laureate immediately set the standard for this award through his ever-growing world fame as a film-making critic of civilization and society in his depictions of the destroyed people’s home. As a lettered humanist, he, like Jan, emphasized the deeply personal moral responsibility we all have in the face of all the evils of the world. When I came to Stockholm to ask if he wanted to accept the award, he smiled and said that he had always admired Jan and quickly pulled me upstairs at his studio on Sibyllegatan and pointed to the wall above the door. There hung a large portrait of Lenin. It was also Roy who later donated our large Soviet emblem in Styrofoam that was featured in the film Gorky Park. Despite being a social democrat, in an interview he not only defended Lenin’s role in world history but when asked about Stalin he asked to think about it in order to weigh everything up. Stalin had, however, saved us from fascism in the Second World War, he then concluded thoughtfully in response to Hallands Nyheter’s question.
2011 Maj Wechselmann
With an indomitable energy equal to Jan’s, she has produced and directed one film a year for more than 50 years, except for the years she made two. Against war, injustice and the manipulations of power, she has remained not only a filmmaker but also a barricade fighter and activist. She accepted the award despite deep disagreements with Jan on many issues. Once in place in Varberg that time, for some reason she came to live at my house and made an indelible impression on my then 18-year-old son Albin by immediately sitting down with him and carefully penetrating his French homework.
2012 Sven Lindqvist
Of all the award winners, Sven Lindqvist is the one who has followed Jan’s footsteps most closely throughout his life and has often been the one who has made the tracks himself, and then from his stable social democratic vantage point. He has reported from the many corners of the world and written decisive criticisms of civilization that have been read far beyond Sweden’s borders. His texts on racism, the anatomy of war and colonialism were decisive, and, like Jan, he always claimed the right to rebel. As a scientist and essayist, he has dug deep into the history of literature and his digging into his own life and identity was as ruthless as Jan’s. In field after field, he competed with Jan, so it was no wonder that his first question to me after the announcement of the award was: Does Myrdal know about this? Then he gave an acceptance speech against Leninism and in the evening, he surprised me by declaring to my direct question that, although he had read almost everything, he had never had time to get through the three parts of Capital. His fantastic little book of thought, An Underground Starry Sky, I have quoted from both before and after at almost every award ceremony. Finally, as the only laureate so far, he brought nudist culture with him to the Lenin Spa in a completely obvious way, in front of the other slightly surprised bathers.
2013 Maj Sjöwall
With her fablelike realism and socialist social criticism, she took the Swedish detective story to a whole new level and inspired the writers who later stood for the international Swedish detective story wonder in the genre that Jan liked the most. In an iconic photo where she was surrounded by all her children and grandchildren on her 80th birthday, everyone except herself was wearing a Lenin mask.
2014 Jan Guillou
Another anti-imperialist veteran from both the Vietnam and Palestine demonstrations of the 60s, who became a fiction novelist in the spirit of Sjöwall/Wahlöö, a journalistic legend and the only one who, with his left-wing perspective, has been able to compete with Jan Myrdal in polemics and public impact in the social debate for more than 50 years. The award ceremony itself was a shocker as it coincided with Expressen’s 22-day long campaign where he was identified as a KGB agent and when he therefore saw Roy Andersson’s fine Soviet emblem hanging as a backdrop on this stage, he initially refused to enter the theatre as he knew that the image of him under this emblem could then follow him for the rest of his life in Expressen’s hate campaigns. In the end, he still gave his acceptance speech during the ten-tag moose I also adorned the stage with, even though he considered himself to be the 20-tag Expressen had always wanted to shoot.
2015 Mikael Wiehe
Already in his first major interview in Aftonbladet, he declared that he wanted to be progressive music’s answer to Jan Myrdal. And so, he became that with his intellectual texts in the fight against racism, imperialism and the irrationality of the capitalist world order. Also, the happiest recipient of the Lenin Award ever, who enthusiastically stated in response to the Cultural New’s provocatively critical question about Lenin that he had longed for this prize! Congratulations again Mikael!
2016 Mikael Nyberg
This Marxist critic has analysed and exposed the irrationality of capitalism more harshly and more persistently than anyone else and mapped the dismantling of the people’s home. For 40 years editor of Clarté, who during this time has introduced the most important international debates on the most important contemporary issues. As an old FNL activist and anti-imperialist, he is one of the few writers who still makes Aftonbladet worth reading. On this stage, he has also sung the Internationale at the finale of the award ceremony every year since 2016! Thank you Mikael!
2017 Stefan Jarl
This ever-curious documentary filmmaker has not only given us our most iconic image of the 60s but has also delved deeply into what capitalism has done to nature and the climate, helped create Folkets Bio (the people’s cinema), given us unforgettable scenes from everyday Sweden and astutely showed what would happen if war came.
2018 Sven Wollter
As a divinely gifted dramatic artist, he has portrayed all the great roles of classical drama, humanism and culture. At the same time, as a revolutionary activist, he has always made his inimitable anti-capitalist voice heard against all the world’s class injustices and has given the longest acceptance speech of the Lenin Award by far.
2019 Göran Therborn
This world-famous sociologist who, with encyclopaedic erudition and overview, has revealed the galloping injustices of our time, as well as shown what and how the ruling class does to rule, has returned to the Swedish debate as an 80+ with an energy and cogency like few others.
2020 Kajsa Ekis Ekman
The first Robespierre Prize laureate to also receive the Lenin Award. Totally fearless and courageous Marxist social analyst and activist with extreme integrity and international reach. Essays and journalism that everyone reads and everyone listens to. Always.
2021 Nina Björk
Already a classic feminist and Marxist self-thinker who has dissected the fundamental existential conditions of our neoliberal civilization. With razor-sharp logic, she argues with crushing weight against all the darkest sides of capitalism.
2022 Carl-Göran Ekerwald
This headstrong one-man encyclopaedia, public educator and cultural giant who, with a consistent underdog perspective, always discovered new sides of our history and the basic conditions of existence, constantly amazed for 101 years. No other Lenin Award laureate has in interviews particularly emphasized Lenin’s relationship with cats and his wife as a weighty argument for accepting the award. Nor has any other laureate welcomed the line of his retired children into the audience or begun a speech by singing the first two verses of Gläns över sjö och strand acapella. Thanks for everything Carl-Göran!
2023 Karl Ove Knausgård
The international giant of autofiction who said he had Jan Myrdal to thank for everything when he highlighted him as his greatest predecessor by far and who, with his acceptance speech for the Lenin Award published in DN, completely rehabilitated Jan Myrdal’s literary greatness after all the hateful attacks on him after the publication of the infamous calumnious book The Secret Letters. Three years after his death, Jan Myrdal once again found himself in the absolute focus of the cultural debate and Knausgård set the standard.
2024 Martin Hägglund
The Marxist and Hegelian with a moral pathos befitting a contemporary European intellectual who, like Jan Myrdal, preaches a secular faith where everything you do every second is with your life at stake and here and now and then we are truly worthy of something better than the growing misery of capitalism. Another world is always possible.