Tea-Bag (2001)

Author Jesper Humlin meets Tea-Bag who lives ilegally in sweden. In order to find some new ideas for his writing he decides to start a course in writing for Tea-Bag and her friends. Things don't develope quite the way he has expected.

Jesper Humlin is one of the most well-respected poets of his generation. But he is more set on getting grants than readers. His poems are difficult to comprehend and his most loyal reader is a Chinese immigrant who in long, elaborate letters demonstrates that he does not have a clue what they are about. His publisher, who always meets Jesper Humlin at the publishing house sitting in his rowing machine on an imaginary voyage across the Baltic Sea, wants Jesper to start writing crime novels instead. He has in fact already informed his sales people that Humlin's next book will be a crime novel and issued a press statement about the fact. However, Humlin's 87 year old mother (who makes a living by selling telephone sex) is already writing a crime novel. Also Humlin's colleague and rival Viktor Leander is planning to write a crime novel. Humlin feels his so far stable position on the Swedish Parnassus beginning to crumble, but what really makes the earth split beneath him is a reading at a library to which a number of prisoners have been invited. The poetry of Jesper Humlin does not go down well with them and the reading ends in fights and chaos.

But chaos is of course next-door neighbour to God, and Jesper Humlin's rescue turns out to be the young African woman Tea-Bag. She has come to Sweden illegally and is living there under different identities. Humlin decides to start a writing course for Tea-Bag and her friends with the ulterior motive of getting new inspiration for his writing. But the course does not turn out the way Humlin has planned and his encounter with the immigrant girls becomes a much greater upheaval than he could ever have imagined. The girls' stories grow into a harrowing but also poetic account of how life in Sweden and in our part of the world looks when seen from another horizon.

Henning Mankell is one of Sweden's greatest contemporary writers. TEA-BAG is a novel which describes a Sweden that many of us have never met and gives a voice to a large part of our population that is normally never heard.

The German edition published February 2003 entered the bestseller list on publication straight as No. 7.

Tea-Bag
Original title: Tea-bag, Leopard Förlag, Stockholm, November 2001

Rights sold

• Holland: De Geus
• Norway: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag
• Germany: Paul Zsolnay Verlag
• UK: Harvill Press
• Finland: Otava
• Denmark: Gyldendal
• Italy: Marsilio
• France: Seuil

Updated: May 17, 2005.