Description

In Diary of an Ending, internationally renowned photographer Lina Scheynius expands her artistic vision to prose, offering an unflinching and intimate exploration of heartbreak and self-recovery.

Blurring the boundaries between diary and essay, Diary of an Ending explores the break-up of a relationship, combining extracts from Scheynius’s diary – written in Swedish and translated by Saskia Vogel – with reflective essays written in English five years on, exploring ideas about art and photography, sex and passion, the act of diary-making, destructive relationships, motherhood and home.

Interspersed with black-and-white photographs, and written with the same unashamed and unfiltered honesty that defines Scheynius’s photography, Diary of an Ending is an intimate hybrid of memoir and autofiction, a meditation on the passage of time and the transformative power of creativity.

‘This book is elegant, honest and compelling. Scheynius masterfully elevates the personal to the universal. The obsessive, internalised circularity of heartbreak is reworked until a portrait emerges of what it means to be human. Diary of an Ending is intimate, impersonal, passionate, detached, anxious, confident, logical, irrational, apprehensive and unflinching.’ – Jack Self

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Lina Scheynius is a photographer known for her distinct, diaristic style of image-making. Her photography captures quiet moments of intimacy and hidden beauty, from nudes to still-lifes and intimate self portraits. At times luminous, then hazy – always intense and thought-provoking – her aesthetics convey the authenticity of sensual experience, never shying away from vulnerability. Scheynius’s work has been showcased in solo exhibitions in Zurich, Tokyo, Oslo, Berlin and London, and her works have featured in group exhibitions at prominent galleries including House of Photography, Hamburg, Centre de la photographie, Geneva, Somerset House, London, and the Foam Museum, Amsterdam. Scheynius used to write a popular weekly photography column for Zeit magazine in Germany, has published nineteen photobooks and has a wide social media following, where she first shares most of her photographs.

Saskia Vogel, born in Los Angeles in 1981, lives in Berlin. She is the author of the novel Permission (2019), the French translation of which was published in 2025 by La croisée, and the co-creator and deputy editor of the new Erotic Review. Her work has appeared in venues such as Granta, The Paris Review, The New Yorker and The New York Times. An award-winning translator of over two-dozen Swedish books, she was most recently a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for her translation of Linnea Axelsson’s novel-in-verse Ædnan. She is at work on her second novel.