Purity
**2021 Nordic Council Literature Prize Finalist**
The stories in Purity take the reader through cities and suburbs, apartments and streets, to find characters struggling to survive in modern society: a man has an outburst on a bus; a fugitive finds insight in a colour wheel; a social realist kills his friend with a hammer; a thief finds himself in books. And cleaners reluctantly go on cleaning.
With gravity and humor, against the backdrop of a violent civilisation, people are depicted as fallen, or waiting to fall, rendered by Tichý with the fury, compassion and emotional complexity of Kendrick Lamar.
Andrzej Tichý (b. 1978) was born in Prague to a Polish mother and a Czech father and has lived in Sweden since 1981. He is the author of five novels, a story collection and a wide range of nonfiction and criticism. Tichý has received critical acclaim for his work, and is widely recognised as one of the most important novelists of his generation. His novel Wretchedness, a post-political foray into modern day Swedish society, won the 2021 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize, and was longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize and shortlisted for the 2021 Bernard Shaw Prize. His latest short story collection Purity was nominated for the Nordic Council Literary Prize.
Nichola Smalley is a translator of Swedish and Norwegian literature. Her translation of Andrzej Tichý’s novel Wretchedness won the 2021 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize, and was longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize and shortlisted for the 2021 Bernard Shaw Prize. She has a PhD in the use of slang in contemporary Swedish and English literature.
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