Eva Alexanderson

Eva Ingrid Elisabet Alexanderson (9 January 1911 – 20 December 1994) was a Swedish writer, translator and publisher. Her best known works are her 1969 lesbian novel Kontradans and her 1983 translation of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose.

Biography Alexanderson was born in 1911 in Vasastan, Stockholm. She graduated from upper secondary school in 1930 and received a Bachelor of Arts from Lund University in 1935. She then joined the lexicography department of the publishing house Svenska Bokförlag, where she worked for three years. In this period she travelled for long periods to France, Italy and Spain, and translated Invertebrate Spain by José Ortega y Gasset in 1937. Her 1964 novel Fyrtio dagar y öknen (Forty Days in the Desert) features lesbianism as a minor theme; it is mentioned that the main character, a woman who travels to Norway to recover from a disease and converts to Catholicism, has had previous erotic relationships with women. However, lesbianism became the central theme in Alexanderson's novel Kontradans (1969, Contra Dance), which depicts two women who fall in love at a commune. The story may have been autobiographical as the main character, like Alexanderson, is a writer named Eva who writes a novel about lesbians.

Alexanderson's 1983 translation of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose was well received by critics and readers and won the in 1985. In the same year, she won the Samfundet De Nio's translation prize. Alexanderson's final novel, Sparkplats för jungfrun – ett socialmänskligt collage, was published in 1992 before her death in 1994.