Ragnar is a provocative psychological novella about a privileged Swedish businessman whose obsession with power, status, and control masks deep childhood wounds, exposing the masculinity and insecurities beneath his image of success. What sources informed this novel’s development?

Ragnar is an integral side-character in my novels In Every Mirror She’s Black and Everything Is Not Enough, who epitomises unchecked white privilege. Having lived in Sweden for over 15 years, the character is informed by bits and pieces of people I’ve met, recognize, or interacted with in various settings. 

Ragnar vows never to become like his father, yet reproduces destructive patterns. How did you approach exploring this painful contradiction?

I wanted to show the real impact and damage that generational trauma can cause. Not only for the person themselves but for those around them, for example, Ragnar’s wife and child. Without therapy and tools to guide healing, people are bound to repeat the same patterns they’d observed before them because it is familiar and in a twisted sense, comfortable. Children don’t do what we say, but what we do.

How does Ragnar’s position within wealthy Swedish society shape his attitudes toward race, gender, and entitlement, particularly in his relationships with independent women?

For a man whose self esteem has been built based on proximity to power as a sense of worth, it was inevitable that Ragnar was going to bring to distorted lens into any relationship, especially when going head-to-head with the opposite sex who society already frames as weaker. So to meet strong independent women to him means (in Ragnar’s world) to break them down and put them back in their place.

By telling Ragnar’s story from his own perspective, you invite readers to understand him without excusing his behavior. How did you navigate that tension?

Every character I create is messy, nuanced, complex, and deeply human. So through my fiction, I always want to highlight the source of a character’s personality or delusion, instead of simply focusing on the symptoms and simplifying my readers’ interaction with them on the page. I want to challenge readers to understand how a person might be navigating the world from a completely foreign lens and holding space for that without reneging on their own values or not holding them accountable.

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