SWEDEN PERSPECTIVE

Stockholm mourns Satrapi with particular intimacy: her husband Mattias Ripa, who died on 8 April 2025, was a Swedish producer, actor and screenwriter. For the Swedish press, this isn't merely an international artist passing — it is a Swedish widow dying "of sadness." Svenska Dagbladet runs a first-person portrait: the journalist crossed paths with Satrapi at several international comics festivals without truly knowing her, yet feels her loss "as if a close friend had died, because her stories are so open, personal and devastating." The Swedish press takes affective inventory: Persepolis as a rupture in comics art, Embroideries on the sexual confidences exchanged between Iranian women, Chicken with Plums on the musician who decides to die slowly after his wife broke his instrument. And the most recent work, Kvinna, liv, frihet (Woman, Life, Freedom), her response to Mahsa Amini's death — "all worth reading if you haven't, or rereading." The Instagram detail is exhumed: Satrapi had posted, word by word, image by image, "For I lost the love of my life," with a photo of Ripa. SvD closes on a simple line: "Sad and beautiful at the same time, like so much of Satrapi's art."