Sigrid Rausing, 62, is a publisher and former editor of Granta magazine. When her best friend, the acclaimed Swedish writer Johanna Ekström, became terminally ill with cancer, Rausing promised to complete her last book. She edited the 13 handwritten notebooks, adding her own commentary. And the Walls Became the World All Around (Granta), which Rausing has now translated into English, is a brave and beautiful memoir of Ekström’s final two years, and a moving meditation on grief and friendship. It was a bestseller in Sweden, where it was first published last year. Ekström died in 2022, aged 51.
Did you have any reservations about agreeing to finish Ekström’s work?
I was in Stockholm helping to look after Johanna in the last few weeks of her life, and I didn’t know she was working on this book. She told me about the notebooks and asked me to finish it – and of course I said yes. These promises, they are not like anything else. They are like a vow. A binding obligation.
