LitHouse podcast

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...

The year is 1995, and 16 year old Shy is sneaking out of the rural boarding school for “difficult” boys, named “Last Chance”. A long history of petty crime, expulsions and frustrated family members has brought him here, but now it is all soon over. With a spliff in his pocket and his Walkman loaded with his drum ‘n’ bass favourites, he’s ready. His rucksack is filled with rocks, and his head is sw...

Do you understand why I’ve decided to tell you about our family? If our stories survive, we will not die, even when our bodies are no longer here on this earth. The Vietnam war was a watershed event in the Cold War as well as in the West’s understanding of itself. But what does the story look like from a Vietnamese perspective? In Vietnam, the war is still a traumatic experience. This is what writ...

In some other world, in some other life, Pinto might’ve prayed in the morning, prayed his šaharit, prayed to be relieved of his abhorrent passion. But the only prayer that came to his mind now was to the Lord to let him keep Osman for the rest of time, for his voice to be the last thing he would hear before slipping into la gran eskuridad. Rafael Pinto is a young Jewish apothecary in Sarajevo, Bos...

A masseuse who rises in the ranks to become Himmler’s confidant. A cross-dressing princess who spies for Japanese secret police in China. A Dutch Jew who personally hands over his friends to the Nazis and the gas chambers. The Collaborators is the story of three most unusual lives, all of whom served the other side during World War II. But it is also the story of their legacies and the ways in whi...

In the novel Glory , we find ourselves in the fictional country Jidada, which is peopled with all kinds of animals; bleating sheep, a confident pig preacher, vicious dogs making up the country’s security forces, and at the very top: the Old Horse, who has ruled the country with an iron hoof ever since independence. He is «the longest-serving leader in a continent of long-serving leaders, and indee...

Joyce Carol Oates is one of the world’s greatest living writers, and is frequently cited as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature. It is truly a momentous occasion that Oates will visit the House of Literature, and in doing so will be visiting Norway for the very first time. Through more than one hundred books spanning most genres, the American legend writes tenderly and with precisio...

In 2021, Abdulrazak Gurnah was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, the first African-born writer to receive the award in close to 20 years. The Swedish Academy awarded Gurnah the prize «for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents». Across the world, more and more readers are...

Do artists have a social responsibility? Should art be «pure» and not related to ethical or political issues? What, exactly, is the role of art? These are questions that the American author Joyce Carol Oates has dealt with through a long writing life, both as an author and as a professor in creative writing at University of Princeton and UC Berkeley. Oates is a legend, and the author of...

Masande Ntshanga is a writer and poet, an editor of New Contrast Magazine and a teacher of creative writing. For his debut novel The Reactive , he was awarded the Betty Trask Award, while his second novel, Triangulum , was nominated for the Nommo Prize for Best Speculative Fiction Novel written by an African. His latest book is the 2020 chapbook Native Life in the Third Millennium . This is Masand...

Maaza Mengiste is a writer, photographer and teacher of creative fiction at Wesleyan University. Her 2010 debut novel, Beneath the Lion's Gaze , depicts the bloody revolution in 1970s Ethiopia, and was named one of the 10 Best Contemporary African Books by the Guardian. Her second novel The Shadow King , portraying the Italo-Ethiopian war of the 1930s, was shortlisted for the prestigious Booker pr...

The year is 2043, and an astronomer at the South-African Space Agency receives a package filled with documents, which contain a warning that the earth will end in 10 years. The documents are diary entries and audio tapes by a girl, relaying first her adolescence in the 1990s, when she explores her sexuality and tries to find her mother, who disappeared without a trace when she was little, and then...

«I’ve always found Science Fiction to be a form that’s irrevocably linked to critiques of power and societal structures,» writer Masande Ntshanga has said. During his adolescence, he read a lot of science fiction, and his latest novel, Triangulum , makes use of several elements from the genre. Science fiction, speculative fiction and afrofuturism are literary genres on the rise on many countries,...

What is transgender literature? Is it simply works by writers who identify as transgender? Or might it be thought of as a lens to read through, or a certain kind of attention? If it is the latter: in what tradition might we locate transgender literature? In this talk, American author  Torrey Peters  will argue for finding the roots of current transfeminine literature in older works that...

Torrey Peters  rocketed into the international literary scene with her debut novel  Detransition, Baby , the first novel written by a trans woman to become an international best seller. Peters explores the complexeties of trans life, and compares transitioning to cis women starting over after a divorce: Everything you thought you knew about the future has to be scrapped, and you have to...

«Every time we say it can’t get any worse it does,» writer Tsitsi Dangarembga has said about the situation in her home country Zimbabwe. The UNs special envoy has reacted to the arbitrary arrests of activists and politicians from the opposition. Last year, Dangarembga was herself convicted after partaking in a peaceful protest with one other activist in 2020. While large parts of the middle class...

Just weeks after the historical film Ellos Eatnu/Let the River Flow had premiered, lead actress and activist Ella Marie Hætta Isaksen was back in chains – for real, this time. Together with fellow Sami activists, she barricaded the Department of Oil and Energy, to protest that the authorities have done nothing in the 500 days since Norway’s Supreme Court ruled that the wind park in Fosen violates...

Through more than 30 years, Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga has made her mark as a writer and director. With her trilogy of novels following Tambu, she portrays a period of upheaval for her home country, from life under the colonial regime of Rhodesia to the struggle for freedom and the disillusioned everyday life after independence. Her debut novel Nervous Conditions was not only the first novel in...

A young girl from a poor family fighting to get the education she wants, but which is primarily reserved for her brother. A beautiful and worldly friend who brings her out of her shell. The history of a region told through the childhood of a young girl. This could be the description of Elena Ferrante’s Naples Quartet, but in fact it describes the trilogy of Tsitsi Dangarembga , began several decad...