Novelist

Sven Axelrad takes pride in being a street-writer. His university degree is in commerce, but Sven is proof that you don’t need a master’s in creative writing, a famous mentor or a pedigree of any kind if you read often, widely and well. Son of a translator and a teacher, Sven grew up in love with words. His first creative pursuit was music. Sven played guitar in multiple bands, and performed as a singer-songwriter, with his focus always on the lyrics of his songs. Even now, music underpins each of his novels with structure and cadence. Sven’s first writing professors were the novels of the Latin-American magical realists, the likes of Bolaño, Marquez, Vargas Llosa and Allende. Later he would read Zambra, Murakami, Enriquez, Saramago, Saunders, de Bernières and a thousand others. Each book contained important lessons, even the bad ones. These lessons culminated in an outpouring of novels, the first of which is being released by Penguin Random House in 2023. BURIED TREASURE is an erudite, playful, philosophical adventure, built on the scaffolding of Bob Dylan’s ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’. Sven’s work pays tribute to his early professors but adds a modern spin and feel for a new age of readers.

Photograph by Misha Lee Tame