Balsam Karam: The known becomes more beautiful when the foreign enters

Balsam Karam is a writer and university lecturer of Kurdish heritage who has lived in Sweden since childhood. She made her literary debut in 2018 with the critically acclaimed novel Event Horizon, which was shortlisted for the Katapult Prize and won the Småland Literature Festival’s Migrant Prize. Her second novel, The Singularity—originally published in Sweden in 2021 and released in English by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2024—was shortlisted for the European Union Prize for Literature, the August Prize, and Svenska Dagbladet’s Literature Prize.

We discussed her experiences as an immigrant, how she brings her mother tongues into Swedish, the prejudices and obstacles she has had to overcome, and her sense of home as a place where she can cry in peace.