LitHouse podcast

With her deep and fearless portrayals of German and European history,  Jenny Erpenbeck  is a unique voice in world literature. Her authorship is widely considered to be among the most important of our time, leaving critics to discuss  when , and not  if  she receives the Nobel prize for literature. This year, her latest novel  Kairos  was awarded the Internationa...

«The security guard adores babies. Perhaps because babies do not shoplift. Babies adore the security guard. Perhaps because he does not drag babies to the sales.» In a Sephora-store on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, a security guard is watching the shoppers. In the early 70’s, Ferdinand arrives in Paris to start his new life and needs to learn the ropes. In the 90’s, friends Ossiri and Kassoum wor...

«Water remembers. It is humans who forget.» A droplet of water finds its way from ancient Mesopotamia to a street urchin in 1840’s London and on to a Yazidi family in present day Iraq. Three people’s lives and destinies are connected by two rivers – the Thames and the Tigris – and the water which flows through them. In the novel  There Are Rivers in the Sky ,  Elif Shafak  weaves to...

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi is a Ugandan British writer, known for her debut novel Kintu , as well as the short story collection Manchester Happened and the novel The First Woman . She has been awarded the Coomonwealth Short Story Prize and the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, and also been named one of the 100 most influental Africans by New African magazine. This is Makumbi’s reading list: Brit...

From intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois to activist Malcolm X, from heads of state Kwame Nkrumah and Muammar Gaddafi to poet Aimé Césaire and artist Bob Marley – they have all played a role in the history of panafricanism. Panafricanism  is a political, intellectual and cultural movement that was first formed around the turn of the last century among Africans in the diaspora, in the UK, the US and...

In the wake of #metoo, the French literary scene has been marked by multiple stories of sexual abuse. Books like Vanessa Springora's  Consent  and Camille Kouchner's  The Familia Grande  have sparked debates about abuse culture, consent, and the misuse of authority. Neige Sinno 's  Sad Tiger  can be read as part of this line of publications, while also giving the conv...

For decades, African speculative fiction has weaved together past and future, combining myths and legends with space exploration and social criticism and broadening the scope of both African and speculative literatures. In this original lecture, invited by The House of Literature and recorded digitally, Nigerian author Wole Talabi presents a timeline of African speculative fiction from its early b...

The word «dictator» might make you think of a select few evil men of the past, who sat alone on their thrones and ruled far-flung kingdoms with an iron fist. Today’s reality is something very different: The autocrats of the world are playing on the same team, doing deals in secrecy to maintain power and keep their riches. They share troll farms and other resources across political lines, either th...

When British-Ugandan  Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi  wanted her debut novel  Kintu  published in Europe, publisher after publisher told her no – the novel was “too African”: It was neither about the colonial period nor about Idi Amin, the two things about Uganda that Western readers have heard of. And also, the characters had such complicated names. They couldn’t imagine any Europ...

Sonia Nasir is a somewhat successful actor in London. After a distressing end to a love affair, she travels to see her sister in Haifa, Israel, where their father’s family is from, and where she’s hardly been since she was a teenager. Soon, she is pulled into a local theatre production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet on the West Bank. And as the past catches up with Sonia, ghosts appear off stage as well....

When she began her masterpiece  The Handmaid’s Tale  in 1984,  Margaret Atwood  was living in West Berlin, just a stone’s throw away from the Wall to East Berlin, with its omnipresent secret police. The world behind the Iron Curtain clearly influenced her famous future dystopia, in which she set as a rule that she would not include any horrors that humans had not already done i...

Canadian author Margaret Atwood is a living legend. Since her debut in 1961 with the poetry collection Double Persephone , she has published more than 70 books of poetry, short story collections, novels, children’s books, essay collections and even opera librettos, including the world-renowned novels The Handmaid’s Tale and the MaddAddam trilogy. Atwood has truly made her mark with her literary ex...

How can Africa reach its full potential when Europe is still the blueprint to model oneself after? Not only has centuries of colonization and exploitation stripped the continent of opportunities, but the term “development” has all but become synonymous with following in Europe’s footsteps. This is the argument of Senegalese academic  Felwine Sarr  in his book  Afrotopia , which has...

The author of twelve novels, along with a number of non-fiction books and plays,  Rachel Cusk  is one of our most prominent contemporary writers. Her brave, razor sharp and original voice has made her a favourite with readers and critics alike. Cusk is a truly innovative writer, pushing the boundaries of the form for each new publication. Already in 2008, when she published her brutally...

Lately, much attention has been given to political attacks on prestigious writers. The attempted murder of Salman Rushdie and the deplatforming of Adania Shibli at the Frankfurt Book Fair sparked international outrage and raised awareness of ongoing threats to individual writers today. Far less attention is given to the fact that across the world, writers are prosecuted and jailed for their suppos...

Igoni Barrett is a Nigerian writer of novels and short stories, especially well known for his award-winning novel 2015 Blackass. In 2014, he was named on the Hay Festival's Africa39 list of African writers under 40. Barrett is also part of the House of Literature's artistic council, advising in our project to promote African literature. This is Igoni Barrett's reading list: Abdulrazak Gurnah, Afte...

What do the Mings, The Rameses’, the Romanovs, the Assads and the Clintons have in common? They are all family dynasties who, for better or worse, have influenced the history of the world. Historian and writer  Simon Sebag Montefiore  is a formidable storyteller, and his detailed and engaging works about historical figures such as Catherine the Great, Stalin and the Romanovs have earned...

Lecture by Denise DeCaires Narain This lecture introduces two of the most prolific Caribbean women writers, Jean Rhys and Jamaica Kincaid, comparing their distinctive styles and thematic focus. Both writers have spoken of the significance of Charlotte Brontë’s  Jane Eyre  in their writing lives and the lecture will explore how this plays out in their work, particularly in their respectiv...

Leila Aboulela is a Sudanese writer, currently living in Scotland. She is the author of six award winning novels, including The Translator (1999), Bird Summons (2019) and River Spirit (2023), as well as a number of plays and short story collections. Aboulela was the first ever winner of the Caine Prize for Fiction, and an elected fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. This is Leila Aboulela’s...

Elizabeth Strout  is one of the most distinct voices in contemporary American literature, and beloved by readers and critics alike. Her international breakthrough came with the novel  Olive Kitteridge , which earned her the 2009 Pulitzer Prize, and which was later adapted into the award winning mini series of the same name. Since then, she has written four books in her Lucy Barton series...

Elizabeth Strout  is one of the most distinct voices in contemporary American literature, and beloved by readers and critics alike. She started writing at an early age, but it would take her many years to finally get published. Back then, her mantra was “just keep going”. This year, Strout’s debut novel,  Amy and Isabelle,  is finally available in Norwegian (translated by Hilde Rød-...

Writer and therapist  Glenn Bech  sparked a larger debate about class issues in Denmark with his autobiographical novel  The Fathership  (forthcoming in Hazel Evans’ translation) and his manifesto  Jeg anerkænder ikke længere jeres autoritet  (“I no longer recognize your authority”). The novel  The Fathership  depicts a brutal childhood characterized by viol...

History is written by the victorious. But do we not also need to hear the story from the other side, from ordinary people caught in the middle of historical upheavals, forced to pick a side, or just try to survive? To those relegated to the footnotes in the history books, or not mentioned at all. This can be said to be the starting point for the novels of Sudanese-Scottish  Leila Aboulela &nb...

The year is 1949, and the state of Israel is in its infancy. In the Negev desert, bordering Egypt, Israeli armed forces have set up camp with the mission to “cleanse it of any remaining Arabs” after the war the preceding year. They happen upon a Beduin family, a teenage girl among them, whom the soldiers rape, kill and bury in the desert. In present-day Ramallah, a young woman discovers these even...

Freedom of expression is never absolute, but subject to laws and social conventions. Threats to freedom of thought and speech can come directly from authoritarian states or religious institutions. But they can also be self-inflicted, in the form of self-censorship. Both forms of censorship exist in democracies as well as dictatorship, and often overlap. Throughout history, authors in particular ha...