LitHouse podcast

Sara Ahmed is a renowned scholar within fields such as feminist theory, queer theory and critical race theory. In her most recent project, Ahmed has interviewed staff and students about their experiences of making complaints about unequal working conditions or abuses of power such as harassment and bullying. The project has returned her to core questions about the role of emotions not only in how...

There is a longstanding literary tradition of portraying the city of Istanbul in writing, both by Turkish and other writers. Where does Turkish writer Burhan Sönmez place himself within this tradition? In his novel Istanbul, Istanbul, four political prisoners are held captive below the city. Afraid to expose each other under torture, they refrain from telling each other personal details. Instead,...

The American writer Kristen Roupenian caused a sensation when her debut short story «Cat Person» was published in The New Yorker in 2017. With #Metoo at its peak, the story’s treatment of bad sex made it The New Yorker’s most-read online fiction text of all time. Roupenian’s debut collection contains horror elements and a fine-meshed humor emerging when humans and power relations are exposed in a...

In French Moroccan Leïla Slimani’s books, the psychological development of the characters is what captures the reader. Lullaby explores the interactions of a small upper middle-class family. What power struggles take place within the walls of this Parisian apartment? What secrets are buried in the nanny’s past? And how do the children end up dead? Leïla Slimani’s conversation with editor of Vindue...

This year marks 101 years since the birth of one of the world’s most influential artists: Ingmar Bergman. The anniversary last year brought renewed focus to his films, but what about his writing? During his life, Bergman wrote more than 150 plays, film manuscripts, essays, articles and works of fiction. The Best Intentions (1991), Sunday’s Children (1992) and Private Confessions (1996) are often r...

How are the Syrian refugees working today to understand and to process what happened before and during the war? What are their thoughts on the current situation? In her book We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled , Wendy Pearlman has gathered testimonies from some of the many hundred exiled Syrians she has interviewed, after they were forced to flee during the first years of the war. Wendy Pearlman i...

In German Jenny Erpenbeck’s most recent novel, The End of Days , her main character dies a total of five times; first as a baby, then as a young girl in a Europe between two world wars, then as a revolutionary fallen from grace in one of Stalin’s Siberian camps, then as a celebrated East-German writer and lastly as a 91 year old in a nursing home in a reunited Berlin. Erpenbeck is considered one o...

Guatemalan writer Eduardo Halfon is a central voice in the new wave of literature from Central America and the Caribbean. The episodic and absurd novel The Polish Boxer moves between the university campus in Guatemala City to the Balkan of gypsys via the Nazis’ concentration camps. The traveler is a university teacher searching for a pianist who might be a gypsy. But he is also searching for his o...

Valeria Luiselli, translated into more than twenty languages, is a central name in Mexican contemporary literature. Her debut novel, Faces in the crowd , has made critics compare Luiselli to writers such as Ali Smith and Zadie Smith. It has now been published in Norwegian, translated by Ingrid Mefald Hafredal. In Faces in the crowd , several temporal levels and several story strands are weaved tog...

In her essay Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions , the Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli explores the fates of Latin American child migrants in and on their way to the US. Luiselli herself lives in the US, and in an acute refugee situation, she volunteered as an interpreter and gained first hand knowledge about the violence and discrimination that the refugees experience. Photographer, wri...

A. S. Byatt was named one of Britain’s fifty greatest writers by The Times in 2008. Her literary breakthrough, Possession: A Romance , was awarded the prestigious Booker Prize. Byatt visited the House of Literature in connection with the 2011 Norwegian publication of her novel The Children's Book , which is set in Southern England in the late 19th century. In conversation with Duke University prof...

Daniel Mendelsohn is a Classics professor, and teaches his students the classic epic The Odyssey . One Spring, his 81 year old father decides to take his class. But what kind of a hero was Oddyseus, really? the father asks critically - a liar who cheated on his wife! This is the starting point for Daniel Mendelsohn’s memoir An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic . In this podcast, Mendelsohn tal...

Ariel Levy is a successful journalist in The New Yorker , where she often writes about women who break with the traditional expectations in how you express and live gender and sexuality. She has a nice little house and is married to the woman in her life. When she, at 37, also becomes pregnant, her life is perfect. Or not. The Rules Do Not Apply (translated into Norwegian by Rune R. Moen) is Levy’...

The Sellout is about an America so steeped in its racist history that race becomes unavoidable. But nobody wants to talk about it, and there is no end of human oblivion, foolishness and evil. The Guardian has dubbed Beatty the funniest writer in America. However, the novel is also characterized by an immensely precise language and deadly seriousness. At the House of Literature, Beatty met writer,...

Autumn (translated into Norwegian by Merete Alfsen) is the first in Scottish Ali Smith’s season quartet. Winter has already come out in English. In both books, hope, warmth, sensuality and humanity is articulated as a contrast to political lies and cowardice. Art is portrayed as a path to a truer, more beautiful and sharper understanding of the world. Exploring human relations and art as a way to...

In this episode, you can hear a lecture by Oxford historian and author of The Silk Roads, Peter Frankopan, about the history of the Crusades, as seen from Asia. The lecture was delivered as part of the 2018 International Saladin Days, on March 6th, 2018. Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international wri...

Colson Whiteheads novel The Underground Railroad was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. It soon became a #1 New York Times Bestseller, it got picked by Oprah Winfrey for her book club, and the US President Obama chose it for his summer reading list. The book mixes the historical novel with allegory and sci-fi, as Whitehead tells the story of Cora, a 15-year-old slave who...

In this episode, you can hear a conversation between Martin Puchner and Helge Jordheim about literature’s role in shaping the world. What came first – the world as we know it, or the stories about the world? Puchner is one of the world’s foremost literary critics and scholars, and professor at the University of Harvard. Jordheim is professor of cultural history at the University of Oslo. The conve...

In this episode, you can hear a conversation between the American writer Jennifer Egan and the Norwegian writer and psychologist Finn Skårderud, about Egan’s novel Manhattan Beach . The conversation took place on February 9th, 2018.   Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. M...

In this episode, you can hear a conversation between the English writer Rachel Cusk and the Norwegian author Linn Ullmann, talking about the first books of Cusk’s fiction trilogy Outline and Transit . The conversation took place on January 24th, 2018.   Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writ...

Nigerian Chimamanda Adichie has long made her mark as a distinct political voice. Both in her novels and her small non-fiction books We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, Adichie addresses issues of power, violence, independence and the role of literature in understanding and expanding one’s view of the world. Hear her in conversation with cu...

Twenty years after her success novel The God of Small Things, India’s Arundhati Roy is back with a new novel: The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. But in between the two, Roy has been busy: through a number of essay books, she has dealt with issues such as pollution, human rights abuses, industrialization and social inequality, she has lived with the maoist guerilla in the jungle and visited the mili...

Édouard Louis, Athena Farrokhzad and Kristina Leganger Iversen has all written literature challenging and expanding the way we think about identity, language and the body. Together with composer and pop artist Sandra Kolstad, they have created the performance The political body. Commissioned for the House of Literature’s ten year anniversary, it was first performed at the House of Literature Octob...

Turkish writer Aslı Erdoğan published several novels, narratives and short stories before she became a more prominent political newspaper writer. In 2016 she was arrested and imprisoned for her attachment to the pro-Kurdish newspaper Özgür Gündem (Free Agenda). She recently got her passport back and was finally able to travel to Oslo to take part in a stage conversation. At The House of Literature...

In this episode, you can hear a conversation between the American writer Chris Kraus and Culture Editor of Morgenbladet, Ane Farsethås. The conversation took place on August 20th, 2017.   LitHouse is a podcast from the House og Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com...