Jessica Schiefauer

Jessica Schiefauer's youth novel Pojkarna is about fourteen-year-old Kim and her friends Bella and Momo, three girls moving in the transitional area between childhood and adulthood. In Bella's garden there is a greenhouse in which the girls create and play in their own space, a free zone where different rules apply. In the greenhouse there is also a magic flower whose sap turns the girls into boys, a masculinity drug that transforms them from object to subject. During nocturnal odysseys they enjoy the power and the privileges a boy's body offers, and Kim, in particular, is lured further and further into the boys' world of homosocial gangs, a community characterised by violence, cruelty and homoerotic undertones.

In Pojkarna fairy tale and imagination are mixed in a realistic depiction of what is it is like to grow up today, seen from a girl's perspective. At the same time, it is a novel of ideas which highlights the different conditions for girls and boys through asking important questions about gender. Schiefauer examines the limits of self and the body, and in the portrayal of Kim she shows that the phenomena of identity and gender describe a perpetual motion, something that is constantly changing and negotiable. The story has a poetic tone and stands out with its imaginative and telling imagery. Jessica Schiefauer (born 1978) was born and brought up in Kungälv outside Gothenburg. Her début novel in 2009 was Om du var jag.