Sweden - Becky Ohlsen [17]
Other Sports
Swedish men have excelled at tennis, including Björn Borg, Mats Wilander and Stefan Edberg (all three have now retired). Borg won the Wimbledon Championships in England five times in a row.
Golf is a similarly popular sport in Sweden with more than 400 courses throughout the country. Annika Sörenstam, ranked as one of the game’s leading female players, hails from Sweden.
Bandy, though similar to ice hockey, is played on an outdoor pitch the size of a football field and teams are also the same size as in football.
Sailing is very popular, around Stockholm in particular, where almost half the population owns a yacht.
For more on participating in sports in Sweden, see Outdoor Activities, Click here.
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MULTICULTURALISM
Swedish music stars José González and Salem Al Fakir and film director Josef Fares are testament to Sweden’s increasingly multicultural make-up. In 2007 the small town of Södertälje, 30km south of Stockholm, welcomed 1268 Iraqi refugees alone; the US and Canada combined accepted a paltry 1027. Some 200 languages are now spoken in the country, as well as variations on the standard – the hip-hop crowd, for example, speak a vivid mishmash of slang, Swedish and foreign phrases that’s been dubbed ‘Rinkeby Swedish’ after an immigrant-heavy Stockholm suburb.
Sweden first opened its borders to mass immigration during WWII. At the time it was a closed society, and new arrivals were initially expected to assimilate and essentially ‘become Swedish’. In 1975 Parliament adopted a new set of policies that emphasised the freedom to preserve and celebrate traditional native cultures.
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Read the news from the underground (mostly in Swedish) at www.sweden.indymedia.org.
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Not everyone in Sweden is keen on this idea, with random acts of hate crimes – including the burning down of a Malmö mosque in 2004 – blemishing the country’s reputation for tolerance. As hip-hop artist Timbuktu (himself the Swedish-born son of a mixed-race American couple) told the Washington Post, ‘Sweden still has a very clear picture of what a Swede is. That no longer exists – the blond, blue-eyed physical traits. That’s changing. But it still exists in the minds of some people.’
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MEDIA
Domestic newspapers are published only in Swedish, but a wide variety of English-language imports are available at major transport terminals and newsstands – often even in small towns.
Nearly 90% of Swedish adults read at least one daily newspaper and most people subscribe for home delivery. Dagens Nyheter is a politically independent paper with a liberal bent, while Svenska Dagbladet is the more conservative daily; both are distributed across the country though based in Stockholm. The evening papers (Aftonbladet and Expressen, the Social Democrat and liberal papers respectively) also have national coverage.
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ARTS
Literature
The best known of Sweden’s artistic greats have been writers, chiefly the poet Carl Michael Bellman (1740–95), influential dramatist and author August Strindberg (1849–1912), and children’s writer Astrid Lindgren (1907–2002).
During WWII some Swedish writers took a stand against the Nazis, including Eyvind Johnson (1900–76) with his Krilon trilogy, completed in 1943, and the famous poet and novelist Karin Boye (1900–41), whose novel Kallocain was published in 1940. Vilhelm Moberg (1898–1973), a representative of 20th-century proletarian literature and controversial social critic, won international acclaim with Utvandrarna (The Emigrants; 1949) and Nybyggarna (The Settlers; 1956).
Contemporary literary stars include playwright and novelist Per Olov Enquis (1934–), who achieved international acclaim with his novel Livläkarens besök (The Visit of the Royal Physician; 2003), in which King Christian VII’s physician conspires with the queen to seize power. Left-wing activist and journalist Stieg Larsson (1954–2004) completed three crime novels before his death: the first, Män som hatar kvinnor (Men who Hate Women;