LitHouse podcast

The Wergeland Lecture 2026 Andrey Kurkov  is one of Ukraine’s most central cultural and literary ambassadors. With titles such as  Death and the Penguin  and  Grey Bees , he has gained readers across the world. But when Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, he was no longer able to write fiction. Instead, he has travelled widely to talk about the reality and br...

Oksana Zabuzhko is one of the central writers of Ukraine’s post-Soviet generation. In 1996, she caused great controversy with her debut novel, Field Work in Ukrainian Sex, in which she challenged the current view won women’s role in society and in the relationship, where she was expected to be subordinate to the man. The novel has become a work of reference for Eastern European feminism, and with...

Few historians can match the position of British  Anthony Beevor.  With his 13 historical book son recent European history, he has become one of the most respected and read writers of history. Especially his books about the Second World War, including  Stalingrad  and  The Second World War  have become modern classics. In his latest book, Beevor delves into the final...

No, reading novels is not a solution to our political miseries. For that organization, active resistance, and harder rhetoric is required. But we need stories. Author  Siri Hustvedt  said these words during a lecture at the House of Literature in 2017, in Donald Trump’s first term as president. Hustvedt is one of those writers who turns to literature as well as organized resistance faced...

After 43 years together, author  Siri Hustvedt  loses her husband, the author Paul Auster, to an aggressive form of cancer. Now there is only Siri left, in a time in which memories, smells and words from the time before seep in. Eventually, she starts writing; about Auster's illness and his last days, about their early days together and their all-consuming love, about decades of a shared...

In A History of Women in 101 Objects , author Annabelle Hirsch shows us how the things around us aren’t just objects, but testimonies to a common cultural history and set of values. Hirsch shows how something as simple as a hair clip can betray power structures and how kitchen appliances have defined women’s role in society. With a playful tone and a political sharpness, A History of Women is a ma...

Albanian Lea Ypi has a talent for combining the personal and the political in history, exploring how we are all shaped by the societies and ideologies surrounding us. In her memoir Free. A Child and a Country at the End of History, she skillfully portrays her own childhood during the socialist regime of Enver Hoxha in the latter half of the 20th century, followed by the state’s collapse and civil...

The history of the Vikings is usually told from the top down, through powerful characters such as chiefs, commanders and royalty, with raids, looting and war at the centre of the narrative. But what about all the others? What was it like to live a normal life as farmer, a merchant, wife or child? This is the central question in a recent book by British  Eleanor Barraclough ,  Embers of t...

Arinze Ifeakandu is a literary shooting star from Nigeria, with a characteristic, lyrical prose, who has been advocated by authors such as Damon Galgut og Colm Tóibín. God’s Children Are Little Broken Things from 2022 is his literary debut, winning him several literary prizes, including the prestigious Dylan Thomas Prize. In addition to the short story collection, Ifeakandu has published several s...

«Everything» has become political – what you eat, what you wear, where you work, what you dream of. Political engagement permeates society, and movements like Occupy Wall Street, the Yellow Vests, and Fridays for Future emerge and create headlines, before disappearing just as quickly. Yet this politicization does not lead to real social change, only to disillusionment and frustration. This is how...

South African Koleka Putuma is an author, a playwright, an editor, amentor, and she has become a cult figure in the activist poetry community. In a direct style that pulls no punches, she writes about homophobia and transphobia, gender and racism, while each line pulses with compassion and love. Putuma entered the literary world with a bang in 2017, with her debut collection Collective Amnesia , w...

After the second world war, many of the biggest war criminals from Nazi Germany flee to South America in the hope of avoiding penalty. One of them is the SS officer Walter Rauff, who settles in Chile, and ends up with a central role in the bloody regime of Augusto Pinochet. How are these two men, their stories and destinies, connected? In his loose trilogy about European history, lawyer  Phil...

Due to issues during the recording, the sound quality is somewhat lower than normal. In the recent memoir of Indian star author and activist  Arundhati Roy,  Mother Mary Comes to Me , we are given the raw and honest story of Roy’s life and childhood with a many faceted mother who was far from easy to live with. Arundhati Roy’s mother Mary took her two small children and left her alcoholi...

Poet and writer  Ocean Vuong  has in just a few years established himself as a leading literary voice of his generation. With his own life as a point of departure – born in Vietnam and grown up in a working-class family in the US – his raw and crystal-clear writing deals with war and trauma, immigration experiences, class, masculinity, sexuality and alienation. In his latest novel, ...

Soukaina Habiballah is from Morocco, and the author of four award-winning poetry collections, a short story collection, a novel and a play, Nini Ya Momo .   This is Soukaina Habiballah’s reading list: Iman Mersal, Traces of Enayat, (trans. Robin Moger)                        &nbs...

With his seventh novel,  Collapse ,  Édouard Louis  has now completed his celebrated family saga about his own upbringing and family. Louis writes ruthlessly and skillfully about subjects such as class distinctions, violence, racism, gender, and political power and powerlessness, and his writing has become a point of reference and inspiration for writers across the world. Through th...

En octobre 2022, Annie Ernaux a reçu le prix Nobel de littérature, en tant que première femme française, « pour le courage et l'acuité clinique avec lesquels elle découvre les racines, les étrangetés et les contraintes collectives de la mémoire personnelle ». Avec des livres comme Les Années, Une femme et L'Événement , qui font tomber les barrières entre autobiographie, fiction et sociologie, Erna...

«The moral component of history, the most necessary component, is simply a single questions, asked over and over again: When it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power?» One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This , Omar El Akkad The lack of a response from the West to Israel’s brutal war in Gaza reveals how the West values certain lives more than others, according to au...

When Nigerian author  Chimamanda Adichie  publishes her first novel in 12 years, it is a real event. With award winning and critically acclaimed titles such as  Americanah, Half of a Yellow Sun  and  We Should All Be Feminists , Adichie has attracted a large readership across the world. Both in her novels and in her non-fiction, she explores what it means to be a woman and...

Wole Talabi is a Nigerian science fiction author. He is best known for his short stories, most of them collected in the collections Incomplete Solutions and Convergence Problems . His latest novel Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon won the prestigious Nommo award for best novel. Talabi has also edited the anthologies Africanfuturism and Mothersound , both central publications in African fantas...

Youssef Rakha  is an award-winning author of both novels and poetry, as well as a journalist and a photographer. I 2009, he was selected by the Hay Festival as one of the best Arabic writers under 40. He is known for  The Crocodiles -trilogy, following a group of poets before, during and after the 2011 revolution.  The Dissenters  is his first novel written in English. The stor...

What characterizes the new Arabic literature? Writers involved in the Arab Spring are now imprisoned, exiled or living with the political repression, wars and disillusionment that has marked the region ever since. How are these experiences expressed in literature and the broader culture? Teresa Pepe is professor of Arabic literature at the University of Oslo. Her research has focused on Arabic lit...

The Arab Spring is when Egyptian Youssef Rakha first starts writing novels. Moroccan Soukaina Habiballah publishes her first poetry collection shortly after, while French Moroccan Leïla Slimani works as a journalist at the time, reporting on the protests unfolding throughout Northern Africa and the Maghreb, before turning to fiction. How have these experiences shaped their writing? All three write...

Abdulrazak Gurnah  was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 2021, as the first African-born writer in almost 20 years, for having, in the jury’s reasong, «highlighted the impact of colonialism and the fate of refugees». Now, in his first new novel following the prize, he has turned his focus closer to our own time. The novel has been titled  Theft . But what is stolen, and who is the...

French Moroccan  Leïla Slimani ‘s own family was the inspiration when she started her critically acclaimed trilogy:  The Country of Others, Watch Us Dance  and this year’s publication,  J'emporterai le feu  (“I will carry the fire”). We follow the Belhaj family through three generations, from when Mathilde leaves France to follow her new husband Amine to his home country M...