Silenced Voice

Ingrid Wall is a Swedish journalist, author, and mother of journalist Kim Wall. She’s worked for more than twenty-five years in the newspaper industry as general assignment reporter, news director, business reporter, and night news editor. In 2000 she was hired as head of communications at Trelleborg Municipality. She is the author of Trelleborg in the 1950s: City of My Childhood and The Beauty of Everyday Language, and coauthor with her husband, Joachim, of A Man, an Island, a Life.Joachim Wall is a Swedish photojournalist and father of journalist Kim Wall. At the age of fifteen, he had his first photograph—which was of George Harrison—published, and his career was set. After running his own picture agency, in 1985 he started working as a press photographer for the evening paper Kvällsposten in Malmö. He went on to cover events big and small, both locally and internationally, for nearly thirty years. He also coauthored a book with his wife, Ingrid, A Man, an Island, a Life.Born in Painesville, Ohio, into a bilingual family (her father’s native language was Finnish), Kathy Saranpa received her bachelor of arts (summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) and master of arts in Scandinavian languages and literature from the University of California, Los Angeles. She defended her dissertation at Yale University under the late George C. Schoolfield, an internationally renowned scholar and translator. She taught translation at the University of Eastern Finland before turning to full-time freelance translation. Dr. Saranpa has lived in Lund, and through her research on the Finland-Swedish writer Ina Lange, has visited Copenhagen many times. Her two children are both professional musicians living in the United States. Dr. Saranpa lives outside Berlin. A Silenced Voice: The Life of Journalist Kim Wall is her first published translation.

One of NPR’s Best Books of 2020“[Kim] packed a lifetime’s worth of experience into her 30 years…A tragically short life that will hopefully serve as inspiration.” —Kirkus Reviews“In this tender memoir, the parents of Swedish journalist Kim Wall recount their daughter’s exceptional life and her murder…The authors recall their anguish and pain during the year following their daughter’s death, but also celebrate her life and share their mission to develop a memorial fund to provide young female reporters with support for their work. This is a passionate portrait of a woman’s meaningful life and her contributions to journalism.” —Publishers Weekly“A Silenced Voice is a tapestry of past and present, at once a joyful chronicling of a life well lived and a family’s reckoning with that life being extinguished.” —Marie Claire“In a powerful memoir, Wall’s parents share how they navigated their grief in the aftermath of their daughter’s horrific death and the investigation and trial that followed. Though their subject matter is unthinkably sad, Ingrid and Joachim Wall focus on Kim and the life she led, sharing stories of her passions and ambitions as a journalist, partner and friend.” —TIME“Journalism grants a kind of license to curiosity, legitimizes it, gives it a professional guise…Kim used it to get herself around the world, to report from Cuba, Uganda, and North Korea. But her story also shows how tenuous, how fragile that feeling of permission can be…A Silenced Voice, translated from Swedish by Kathy Saranpa, is about everything else Kim was…If the law represents one form of justice, one of the promises of journalism is to enact another: doing justice to the people you write about, justice to the things they care about, justice to the person behind the story. A Silenced Voice is an exercise in that pained, loving, generous justice. It insists that the story of Kim’s murder include the details only parents remember: childhood ceramics projects, her favorite type of pen, the kinds of presents she brought her family home from travels around the world…The Walls are working to make sure that Kim Wall’s name will not be a warning, but a tag under ambitious investigative pieces, a line on resumes, a ticket, a calling card. Through it all you can see how desperately important it is for them, like it was for her, to get the story right.” —NPR.org“In their jointly written and heart-breaking memoir, Ingrid and Joachim Wall, the parents of murdered Swedish journalist Kim Wall, remember the trauma of their loss and honor the memory of their daughter. A delicate, brave, and beautiful rendering of unimaginable grief.” —CrimeReads