Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow

Elin Anna Labba is a SÁmi journalist and was previously editor-in-chief of the magazine Nuorat. She received Sweden’s August Prize for Best Nonfiction as well as the prestigious Norrland Literature Prize.   Fiona Graham is a British translator living in Belgium. She translated Elisabeth Åsbrink’s 1947: When Now Begins, which was an English PEN award winner and a National Public Radio Best Book of the Year.

"To think that someone can write so poetically and beautifully about something that hurts so much . . . It is a staggering read, and we cry. Thanks to Elin Anna Labba, no one can turn a blind eye to the abuses committed by the Swedish state against the SÁmi people. The suffering remains with many, but the truth has finally been told."-Ann-HelÉn Laestadius, best-selling author of Stolen   "The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow speaks through the forced displacement of the SÁmi from their beloved homeland to make a gathering place of stories, images, joiks, and letters, singing the contours of SÁmi resistance through time, through the forest, and through Indigenous sorrow."-Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, author of Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies   "The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow, a book about the SÁmi refusal to be wholly dispossessed, is a beautiful addition to the global Indigenous literary tradition. Elin Anna Labba tends to the poetry of everyday thought and reminiscence and, in so doing, offers up an idiom of land that is endlessly moving. A work of collective testimony, a remapping of Swedish history, an archive in and of itself, and, by its end, a vital rallying call."-Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of A Minor Chorus   "Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, several hundred members of SÁmi reindeer-herding families were uprooted from their homelands in northern SÁpmi and forced by the Norwegian and Swedish governments to relocate farther south in Sweden. A descendant of one of the families, Elin Anna Labba tells this wrenching, forgotten history with tender attention, using interviews, photos, and documents. A crucial contribution to Indigenous and SÁmi history, The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow is heartbreaking, infuriating, and necessary reading."-Barbara Sjoholm, author of From Lapland to SÁpmi: Collecting and Returning SÁmi Craft and Culture   "SÁmi journalist Labba makes the trauma of the forced removal of her people from northern Norway and Sweden both palpable and painful in this profound debut history."-Publisher’s Weekly, starred review   "The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow is a lovely and well-made book of translation, and it includes some important history."-UP Book Review   "The words and photos of her family members and their community are poetic and heartbreakingly beautiful. The yearning to go home resonates as a theme through all the songs, chants, poems, photos, and letters. Real, important history is told here."-Lake Superior Magazine   "The author does justice to her subject in a way that a scholarly work would not do. History gets personal, soft-spoken yet eloquent."-World Literature Today   "Portrayed alongside historical documents, photographs, poetry and artwork, these intimate and powerful stories highlight the scale of the event’s trauma, and its reverberations today."-Scandinavian Review