5 Euro Selma Lagerlöf

Issued to mark the 50th anniversary of Lagerlöf's death, this coin arrived at a moment when Sweden was reassessing its cultural canon — she had been the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1909, and the first woman to appear on a Swedish banknote. The Nordic gold alloy, a copper-aluminium-zinc-tin composition developed specifically to resist counterfeiting of low-denomination bimetallic coins, was relatively new to Swedish coinage when this piece was struck.