Behind the Factory Walls

Västerbottensteatern's artistic director Johanna Salander talks with author and former factory worker Maria Hamberg about highlighting invisible stories and places, and about how memories settle in the body.

Maria Hamberg was born in 1954 and lives in Ullånger in Ångermanland. For many years she had dreamed “of telling the story of the women who, like myself, walked around as immigrants in a man’s world, in blue overalls and steel-toed boots during working hours”. She wanted the rest of the world, who had not been inside workshops and factories, to meet people they did not know and who they did not believe existed. That is how it began, with short stories in various newspapers. Little by little it became a book. Then several. Her book Some Made the Holes, about women on the workshop floor, has been a great source of inspiration for Johanna Salander and was the start of work on the play Stygn, about the women who worked at Algots Nord, which is also playing during The Storytelling Festival.

Maria Hamberg is both critically acclaimed and award-winning. In 2012 she was awarded the trade union movement's Ivar Lo Prize and in 2018 the Birger Norman Prize.

In the fall of 2025, she will be publishing the book The Really Important: Memory, Body, Place.

"There is a difference between reality. And real reality. Even memories change over time. But there are also memories and thoughts that are in the body, in the movement of the hand or that live in a place where you have been. When you feel the wind caressing your cheek, how the soil falls over your fingers in the planting hole, you smell a special scent or see a fir tree bending under the weight of the snow and you are home, you know that you can. That is what this book is about - the truly real."