Lina Wolff is a Swedish author and translator. She studied literature and language studies at the University of Lund and spent a few years living in Spain and Italy, where she worked as an interpreter and as a sales agent/trade agent. Her earlier work includes a collection of stories and the novel Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs, which was compared with the work of Roxane Gay, Maggie Nelson, Zoe Pilger and Miranda July by The Guardian. The ‘male gaze’ in Western literature forms an indirect, playful obsession in her latest novel The Polyglot Lovers. The book is divided into three sections and is about three people with three types of unfulfilled desires. Ellinor, 36 years old and from a small village in the south of Sweden, places a lonely hearts ad looking for ‘a tender – but not too tender – man’. The unhappy writer Max seeks a lover who speaks all his languages. His quest takes him through Stockholm to Italy where he meets Lucrezia, the granddaughter of a rich marchioness. Ellinor, Max and Lucrezia have more in common than they realise, including a presumed lost manuscript. For her novel, The Polyglot Lovers, Lina Wolff won the 2016 August Prize, one of the most celebrated literary prizes in Sweden.