LETTER FROM MALMÖ

This could be the sign of a wake-up call. At the end of 2024, before Christmas, Swedish giant booksellers – independent bookshops are rare in the Nordic country – reported a 10-15% increase in sales of books for children and teenagers. They see only one explanation for this: Parents have finally come to grips with the seriousness of the "reading crisis" that has been debated in Sweden for several years and moved to the top of the political agenda after university professors sounded the alarm.

Many of them have noted that their students, who are among the best in Europe, are finding it increasingly difficult to read long texts or write correctly in Swedish. "I currently have 55 students in a history of literature course, and many of them say they have great difficulty assimilating the course texts," Elisabeth Friis, associate professor of ancient literature at Lund University, told the regional newspaper Sydsvenskan on November 10, 2024. "It's tragic because these students should be very good at reading long books," she added.

At the Karolinska Institute in Solna, on the outskirts of Stockholm, Ellinor Kenne, coordinator of basic science courses taught to medical students at the start of their course, observed the same phenomenon: "We've changed a textbook for the third semester because it contains less text. We are lowering our ambitions a little in terms of the amount of text students have to read. There is no point in aiming too high, because then you lose students," she said on November 19, 2024, on the Vi Lärare website, published by the teachers' union.

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