Victoria Harnesk

Victoria Harnesk grew up in the mountains and belongs to the Sirges Sami village, where Sami culture, storytelling and food production and processing have always been a natural part of everyday life and worldview. As a child in the 1970s, she shared her culture with hikers who settled by the fire in her grandmother’s peat hut.

Today, Victoria lives back in her childhood home in Porjus, north of the Arctic Circle on the Swedish side of Sápmi. She wrote the internationally acclaimed book Smak på Sápmi (Taste of Sapmi) which collects Sami food traditions that were previously mainly passed on orally. The book has won a handful of awards, including Sweden’s best regional meal literature (Måltidsakademien) and Best in the World in the categories Local Cuisine and Historical Recipes (Gourmand World Cookbook Awards). It was also named the second best cookbook in the world in the last 20 years.