Novels, drama, essays and public intellectual life — with women, memory and power as recurring subjects.
Author · playwright · journalist · critic
Upcoming book · 22 April 2026
Den ropande flickan
A dark, charged novel about childhood testimony, guilt, friendship and the price of truth.
The language is rich, the notoriously difficult erotic scenes hold, indeed impress, and the biographical material is genuinely fascinating.
Books
Eleven published titles between 2001 and 2024: novels, essays, a biography, children's books and a work of public debate arranged as a single literary archive.
Featured book
2023
Novel
Publisher pageRomanus & Selling, 2023
A furious, unruly portrait of the woman and artist Marika Stiernstedt. A novel about the lies we live by, power struggles and the writing of biography. Who gets to say what, about whom?
Press voice
The language is rich, the notoriously difficult erotic scenes hold, indeed impress, and the biographical material is genuinely fascinating.
2024
2024
Children's book
Publisher pageNatur & Kultur, 2024
The year is 1911 and Lina lives with her mother and father on Söder in Stockholm. They are fairly poor, but life carries on until Lina meets the women fighting for women's suffrage. The adventure can begin.
2023
2023
Children's book
Publisher pageNatur & Kultur, 2023
It is the Viking Age. Gylla is a thrall living a hard but predictable life. When it turns out that her mistress is ill, everything changes. People begin to whisper about human sacrifice, and suddenly Gylla's life is in danger.
2022
2022
Children's book
Publisher pageNatur & Kultur, 2022
Kristin lives with her mother in Älvdalen. She has inherited her mother's gift for healing the sick, and at night she sometimes flies. Suddenly several women in the district are accused of witchcraft. Can Kristin save them with her powers?
Kärnborg writes with directness and drive.
2021
2021
Novel
Publisher pageNatur & Kultur, 2021
Although Kristina spent years trying to free herself from the crown, she now bitterly regrets it. She looks back on her life as Sweden's monarch and wonders why everything turned out as it did. What might she have done differently?
It is this double perspective that makes the novels so fascinating. The protagonist becomes so vividly alive that deep down we cannot help hoping what we know will happen might somehow not need to happen.
2016
2016
Novel
Publisher pageNatur & Kultur, 2016
It is the early seventeenth century. Sweden is a newly awakened nation-state entering exhausting wars: looted riches for the court, starvation for the people. At the center stands Chancellor Axel Oxenstierna, a shrewd operator.
A tasteful account of the age of empire... at moments it recalls two of our major writers, PO Enquist and Per Wästberg.
2015
2015
Non-fiction
Publisher pageAtlas, 2015
Journalism is no future industry - everyone knows that by now? But what do fewer newspapers, slimmer newsrooms and “click monsters” mean for the future of democracy, in Sweden and other countries?
2010
2010
Novel
Natur & Kultur, 2010
The middle-aged teacher Johan is struck by something that may be infatuation, or something worse. A feverish account of suggestion and delusion, a triangle drama with fateful consequences for everyone involved.
A modern moral portrait.
2008
2008
Novel
Publisher pageNatur & Kultur, 2008
The novel about the servant Hannah and the gentleman Arthur is a compelling story of how two people from opposite ends of the Victorian caste system meet and form a symbiotic relationship that overtakes their lives.
The occasionally dark and ambiguous quality of the story gives the direct, lucid language a poetic spark.
2003
2003
Essay
Publisher pageAlbert Bonniers Förlag, 2003
A personal, winding book that explores medieval history and saints' legends. It departs from pilgrimages, including Santiago de Compostela, and reflects on faith, blisters and relics.
Ulrika Kärnborg's pilgrimage narrative Stjärnfältet is checked out at every library.
2001
2001
Biography
Natur & Kultur, 2001
Fredrika Bremer is best known as one of the pioneers of the women's movement. As a writer she is nearly forgotten, despite being one of Sweden's most read and debated authors in the nineteenth century. The biography restores Bremer as a European intellectual grappling with the major questions of her age.
At last. A passionate nineteenth-century intellectual meets her congenial interpreter.
Drama
Two works in which women's voices, survival and the language of violence move to the foreground - written for stage and radio with the same literary sharpness that shapes the rest of the body of work.
01 / Stage play
She was ten when Wolfie locked her in the cellar and eighteen when she managed to escape. She was the girl the whole world was looking for. Now they have found her, Natascha Kampusch. After eight years. Who is she now?
... a compelling thought experiment, well written and fully in control of its intentions.
Liv Mjönes draws an unrelenting, crystal-hard portrait of the survivor Natascha Kampusch...
02 / Radio drama
In a newly written triptych, Ulrika Kärnborg sketches a brutal landscape with a presence and precision that lets listeners experience the violent reality that in Ciudad Juarez is almost everyday life. A reality in which history is written on the bodies of dead women.
As a play text, Maria Villas Death recalls a text by Koltes, with the same relentless drive toward death.
Public life
Alongside her writing, Ulrika Karnborg has long worked in the Swedish daily press, both as an editorial writer at Expressen and as a culture journalist at Dagens Nyheter. For several years she was a television columnist at Dagens Nyheter, later a columnist at Aftonbladet, and she has written literary and theatre criticism for Expressen.
As an editorial writer she has also contributed to Dagens Arena, and in addition she has worked as the presenter of "One Book, One Author" (UR). She has contributed essays to Sveriges Radio P1 and to a wide range of cultural journals.
Her public assignments also include board work for the Swedish Writers' Union and the Konstnärshem Foundation, as well as serving as chair of the Fredrika Bremer Association.
She is frequently engaged as a debater, panelist and moderator.
About
Ulrika Kärnborg is an established Swedish author who works as a playwright, journalist and cultural critic. She studied literature, cultural studies and journalism at Lund University and Roskilde University. Her practice spans novels, biography, stage work, radio and public intellectual life.
Press
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