I've been trading emails recently with Swedish author, photographer, and publisher Michael Eriksson, who is the only publisher currently bringing out Westerns in Sweden. His series "Tornado Blaze" is featured in the magazine he publishes, RETROFUTURE, and he has a Western comic book, "Montana Blue", coming up as well. He has two blogs: Cult Portal, about books, music, TV, and movies, and Trinkelbonker, with much of the same sort of material but covering his publishing enterprises as well. Both have a lot of interesting stuff on them.
At one time the Scandinavian market for Westerns was very strong. It was one of the most popular genres in that part of the world during the Sixties, Seventies, Eighties, and on into the Nineties, when it started to decline. Now it's all but disappeared, and Mike deserves a lot of credit for keeping it alive. I don't read Swedish, unfortunately, or I'd be reading Tornado Blaze. I'll certainly be keeping up with his blogs. (That's model Ellinor Nordbakk as the character Tornado Blaze.)
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I bet there are some really great genre stories in other languages that we'll never get to read. Course, I can't keep up with the good ones in English.
Westerns are still popular in Norway. Every month 2 or 3 westerns are published. Most of them are reprints, but there also are some new translations.
Thanks for that information, Pony. The Norwegian market for Westerns was always really strong. The Morgan Kane series originated there, and a lot of the books by my friend Len Meares were translated there, with his characters Larry and Stretch changed to . . . Ben and Bill, was it? Something like that.
Oops, sorry, I did it again! Okay, this is me really, not my wife:
Yes, Ben and Bill. There were also lots of Finnish westerns and I've just applied for a grant on a book-length study of the history of Finnish western fiction.
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