LitHouse podcast

Nadifa Mohamed is the writer of three novels, with the two first, Black Mamba and The Orchard of Lost Souls available in Norwegian translation so far. In 2017, Mohamed participated in The House of Literature’s festival on Somali literature, A nation of poets. During the pandemic, she interviewed Arundhati Roy and Édouard Louis for the House of Literature and Linn Ullmann’s podcast How to Proceed....

Damon Galgut’s Booker Prize-winning novel  The Promise  follows the white South-African Swart family, living on a farm outside Pretoria. The story follows the nuclear family through the waning years of the apartheid state, through the 1994 liberation and until the children are grown, close to our time. Galgut’s story glides through the decades of South Africa’s recent history, weaving in...

Warsan Shire  is a critically acclaimed and award winning British poet. In 2016, the artist Beyoncé named her one of her favorite poets, and she appears both on the album «Lemonade» and in the film «Black Is King». In 2014, she was the first poet named Young Poet Laureate of London. Shire, born to Somali parents in Kenya and raised in Great Britain, has said that she draws on her own experien...

Édouard Louis 2022: In a world dominated by state narratives and information wars, what is the role of the writer? Power imbalances, exploitation and the dark history of Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe are among the recurring themes in the works of Finnish-Estonian writer and playwright  Sofi Oksanen. Her blend of surrealist elements and real-world political plotlines allow for a literary...

Édouard Louis 2022: Alan Hollinghurst  and  Édouard Louis  have long read each other’s books with great interest. While Louis has written brutally honest depictions of growing up gay in a homophobic family and environment, Hollinghurst’s fiction explores gay culture and experience through the decades, including the AIDS crisis and gay life prior to decriminalization in the UK. While...

Édouard Louis 2022: In his most recent book,  Changer : méthode , Édouard Louis shows just how indebted he is, as a writer and thinker, to the works of the French academic and author  Didier Eribon . Ever since seeing him lecture early in his life, Louis and Eribon have developed a deep understanding of the other’s works and ideas, with Eribon’s novel  Retour à Reims  even prov...

Édouard Louis 2022: A lecture by Maaza Mengiste, introduction by Édouard Louis. What is the responsibility of the writer in documenting and unpicking the violence around us? In Édouard Louis’s book  The History of Violence , he explores violence from the point of view of the victim of rape and attempted murder, but also the violence that the perpetrator has experienced from society. In the no...

Édouard Louis 2022: A young gay person escapes their small town in search of friendship and love in the big city. A recurring theme as much in real life as in literature. In his most recent book,  Change: Method , Édouard Louis delves deeper into his own journey – as told in  The End of Eddy  – from his poor upbringing and to the cultural elite in Paris, and the deliberate steps he...

Édouard Louis 2022: This lecture was held on November 18th at The House of Literature in Norway, during their three days of conversations, lectures, and events from  Édouard Louis’  writing and works. The lecture was written for this occasion and centres around Louis’ recent experience of losing his older brother. Few writers have championed the working class like Édouard Louis. In each...

In Checkout 19 Claire-Louise Bennett writes about the joy of reading, about when fiction becomes so vividly alive that you take it with you into the real world. Through a series of chapters - told in I-, she- and even we-form - we follow the main character's development from a little girl to an adult woman, through childhood, promiscuity and bad boyfriends. At the same time, there is a development...

What is life like for young and regime-critical Russians today?  Kira Yarmysh  is best known in Russia as a spokeswoman for the Russian oppositional politician Alexei Navalny. Now her debut novel  Incredible Incidents in Women's Cell No. 3  is making headlines. In Russia, the book was quickly branded as "gay propaganda" by Russian authorities, due to depictions of same-sex love...

“Ukrainians have never accepted censorship. They have always wanted to say and write what they think. That is why almost all Ukrainian writers and poets in the 1920s and 1930s were shot by Soviet authorities… If Russia succeeds, we will have a new generation of executed writers and politicians, philosophers and philologists." How should one fight for freedom of speech and facts in a war of propaga...

Does a house equal a home? This is one question Deborah Levy explores in her recent book  Real Estate , the third and final instalment in her series of "living autobiographies", autobiographies written in the storms of life, and not in quiet contemplation towards the end of it. The need for a place of one's own - whether it be a physical place or a place in one's writing – is a recurring them...

The new HBO mini series The Plot Against America is based on the Philip Roth novel (2004) by the same name. The novel tells the counterfactual story of Charles Lindberg’s presidency, based on the real man and what might happen if he, with his fascist sympathies, was elected president of the United States around 1940.The US has become increasingly racist and polarized during Donald Trump’s presiden...

Njabulo Ndebele grew up during the apartheid, and is one of South Africa's leading writers and intellectuals. He is the former vice principal at the University of Cape Town, and the author of the groundbreaking book The Cry of Winnie Mandela , in which he blends essay and novel, fact and fiction in an exploration of women’s position in the freedom struggle. Koleka Putuma was born in 1993, and belo...

Through titles such as Cooked, The Omnivore’s dilemma and In defense of Food, Michael Pollan, Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley’ and of the Practice of Non-Fiction at Harvard University, has distinguished himself as one of the world’s foremost feature writers and authors of non-fiction. His latest book How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousnes...

Mexican poet Gloria Gervitz has been writing the same poem for over forty years. The epic poem Migrations ( Migraciones ) is one of the greatest poetic projects of our time – a poem in constant movement through family, religion, death and sexuality, but also through perpetual newly published versions. It is based on the history of Gervitz’s own Jewish family that fled persecution in Eastern Europe...

Is the assertion that freedom of expression is under pressure just a myth used to cover up more important political incompatibilities?   In this event with the british-Sudanese author and Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik, held at the House of Literature 22.january 2020, Malik opened Litteraturhuset’s Commission on the Freedom of Expression. In her lecture, she talked about freedom of expression. H...

In Norway, Rachel Kushner is best known for her 2014 novel  The Flamethrowers , set in New York’s art world. In Kushner’s new, critically acclaimed and Booker nominated novel The Mars Room , we are introduced to a very different yet also very American milieu. Here we meet Romy Hall, who is in prison for killing a man who followed and tormented her. Through Hall’s life inside the prison walls, Kush...

What if your view of the world is based on the experiences of black women, or those of working class, queer or transgendered women, and by that breaks with the way that the white middle class says a feminist is “supposed to be”? Gay’s collection of essays, Bad Feminist , flew right into The New York Times’ best seller list when it was published in 2014. Her sharp, vulnerable and funny voice has be...

What happens when blackness and whiteness are turned inside out? The Metamorphosis by Kafka is an obvious literary model when the Nigerian writer Igoni Barrett lets the main character of his last novel, Furo Wariboko, wake up on the day of his job interview to discover that his skin color has changed: He has turned white. His ass, however, remains black, and for this reason, the novel bears the ti...

The American writer Chris Kraus has previously visited The House of Literature to talk about I Love Dick, a semi-autobiographic novel first published in 1997, which still attracts new readers after more than twenty years. In the House of Literature’s series “literary guiding stars”, authors are asked to talk about a writer they greatly admire. In this lecture Kraus tells about another American wri...

In Siri Hustvedt’s new novel Memories of the Future , the grown up and well established writer S.H. enters into dialogue with twenty-year-old S.H., with her reflections, her writing and her experiences. What do we forget, and how can we use our memories? The writer Linn Ullmann is among those who have long followed Hustvedt’s writing, and in her last novel, Unquiet, she also examines the past and...

Several women who have survived brutal imprisonment and sexual violence in Syria are part of lawsuit initiatives against the current government. How may these initiatives contribute to hold the government responsible for their crimes, and to better the situation for Syrian women? Ibrahim Olabi is director of the Syrian Legal Development Program, and works with human rights issues connected to the...

How can we understand the movement Gilets Jaunes – the Yellow vests? What does this police violence against blacks say about the official French view of black people? Édouard Louis’s latest novel, Qui a tué mon père, or Who Killed My Father, has recently been published in Norwegian and English translations. Here, Louis writes about his father’s broken body. He recognizes the same broken, French wo...