Annabelle Hirsch is a German-French journalist, author and translator. A History of Women is her first book and has garnered wide recognition since its publication in German in 2022.

Now, she visits the House of Literature for a lecture on reading cultural histories out of the objects that surrounds us, where everyday objects can be symbols of liberation as well as subjection.

After the lecture, there will be a short conversation led by author, women’s rights advocate and Director of the House of Literature, Susanne Kaluza. Kaluza has written two additional chapters for A History’s Norwegian publication and will meet Hirsch on stage for a short conversation.

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Ordinary humans in the midst of history is also the focus in her new book, Indignity: A Life Reimagined. An unknown photopgrah of her grandmother honeymooning in Mussolini’s Italy pops up on social media, making Ypi question everything she thought she knew about her family. Was her grandmother a Nazi collaborator? Or perhaps a Communist spy?

This is the beginning of a thorough examination of her grandmothers life, one that takes Ypi back to the Ottoman empire, to Greece and then Albania through alternating regimes and occupants.

Lea Ypi is a professor of political theory and philosophy at the London School of Economics. Her book Free was warmly received by both critics and readers, and is so far translated into 30 languages.

Writer and journalist Simen Ekern has published several books about European and Italian politics and history. He joins Ypi for a conversation about ordinary humans in the midst of history.

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This is the central question in a recent book by British Eleanor Barraclough, Embers of the Hands. Taking her starting point from archaeological finds in order to tell the story of ordinary people’s lives in the Viking Age, she reveals how, beneath the surface, we find stories equally dramatic to the great heroic tales of those on the top.

On stage, she will be joined by her Norwegian colleague Tore Skeie. With books such as his award winning The Wolf Age: The Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons, and the battle for the North Sea Empire, Skeie depicts a both vivid and brutal Viking Age rife with decisive events. Skeie’s approach to history is mainly through the upper class, such as through Saint Olaf or the nobleman Alv Erlingsson.

Skeie and Barraclough write the history of the Viking Age from two different perspectives; from the bottom up and from the top down. What can these two ways of reading history learn from each other?

The conversation was moderated by Carline Tromp, writer, critic and old norse philologist.

The event was part of the Festival of Non-Fiction 2025.

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This is Ifeakandu's reading list:

* Chinua Achebe

* Peter Abrahams, Mine Boy

* Imbolo Mbue, Behold the Dreamers

* NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names

* Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

* Toni Morrison

* James Baldwin

* Maya Angelou

* Gbenga Adesina

* I.S. Jones

* Ebenezer Agu

* Logan February, Painted Blue with Salt Water

* Gbenga Adeoba

* Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo, The Tiny Things Are Heaviest

* Eloghosa Osunde, Vagabonds!

* Chukwuebuka Ibeh, Blessings

* Gbolahan Adeola

* Otosirieze Obi-Young from Open country magazine

The host in this episode is Madeleine Gedde Metz

Editing and production by the House of Literature

Music by Ibou Cissokho

The House of Literature’s project to promote African literature is supported by NORAD.

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This is how Belgian historian Anton Jäger defines our times in his book Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences. Jäger describes how we are caught between continuous politicization and political apathy, where the focus has shifted from institutions to short lived movements and social media.

Torbjørn Røe Isaksen is the political editor in the business newspaper E24, and he has read Jäger’s book with great interest. In addition to his long experience as an MP and from various ministerial positions in government for the Norwegian conservative party Høyre, he is the author of several books, including Ingen tror på nåtiden (No one believes in the present) from 2023. He joined Jäger during the Festival of Non-Fiction 2025 for a conversation about our hyperpolitical present, and what to do about it.

The event is part of the Festival of Non-Fiction 2025.

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This is Putuma's reading list:

* Vuyelwa Maluleke

* Maneo Mohale, Everything Is a Deathly Flower

* Busisiwe Mahlangu, Surviving Loss

* Octavia Butler, The Parable of the Sower

*Arinze Ifeakandu, God’s Children Are Little Broken Things

* D’bi.young

The host in this episode is Åshild Lappegård Lahn

Editing and production by the House of Literature

Music by Ibou Cissokho

The House of Literature’s project to promote African literature is supported by NORAD.

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In his loose trilogy about European history, lawyer Philippe Sands takes us through the major developments of international law, from the Holocaust up to our time. Beginning with East West Street, the trilogy combines the historical, judicial and personal in a literary masterpiece about one of humanity’s most commendable ambitions: That the people behind history’s biggest crimes are held accountable.

Now, Sands concludes his trilogy with 38 Londres Street, about the dictator Augusto Pinochet, the Nazi Walter Rauff and the international legal system’s long effort to catch up with them.

Philippe Sands is a French British writer and human rights lawyer specializing in international law. He has written several award-winning books, and as a lawyer, he has argued a number of high-profile cases in international courts, including for Mauritius, the Phillipines and recently for Palestine’s self-determination.

Critic and writer Karin Haugen is among those who have followed Sands’s work and writing over the years. Now, she will join him for a conversation about the dictator, the Nazi, and the long arm of the law.

This conversation took place during the Festival of Norwegian Non-Fiction 2025.

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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 alcoholic husband, brought her own family to court in order to abolish the discriminatory inheritance laws in her home state, and built a unique school that made her a beloved and almost mythical figure of her community and beyond. Towards Roy and her brother, however, she was volatile, sharp and cruel. Still, Roy insists that this forced her to see the world from different vantage point, turning her into the writer she is today.

The memoir also depicts Roy’s own path, leaving home for a world of film, literature and activism, towards a backdrop of India’s growing Hindu nationalist movement, spearheaded by Modi. We witness Roy’s incessant fights against this movement, on behalf of the environment, of local communities and minorities.

As in Roy’s earlier literature, Mother Mary Comes to Me shows us how the personal and political is intimately linked for all of us. Roy portrays her own path as well as those around her with both warmth and bite, in the precise, inventive, and deeply original language that has become one of her distinctive features.

Arundhati Roy is the author of the Booker prize winning The God of Small Things, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and a number of non-fiction books, including My Seditious Heart, Kashmir: The Case for Freedom og Walking with the Comrades.

At the House of Literature, Roy was joined by poet and writer Athena Farrokhzad, for a conversation about her mother, her childhood, and becoming the writer and activist she is today.

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In his latest novel, The Emperor of Gladness, we meet 19-year-old Vietnamese-American Hai, as he is about to end his own life, but he is saved by a chance meeting with an old and senile Lithuanian woman, Grazina, and an eclectic group of co-workers in a run-down fast food restaurant.

In Vuong’s America, the idea that the outsiders of society and the working-class poor can escape poverty through hard work is exposed as a lie. The closest they get to a break from their dead end days are drugs, pills or a breather in the restaurant’s freezer. But through the story of Grazina, Hai and his colleagues, he shows how unexpected friendships and care for those around us can be a respite in all the hopelessness.

Ocean Vuong is the winner of the American Book Award, the Mark Twain Award, the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whiting Award, to name a few. He is known for the award-winning and critically acclaimed titles Night Sky With Exit Wounds, Time Is A Mother and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. His poetry is also clearly visible in his novels, vibrating with lyricism and metaphors that say with you after reading.

At the House of Literature, Vuong was joined by the Norwegian poet and editor Priya Bains for a conversation about loss and grief, chosen families and writing about the working-class poor.

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This is Soukaina Habiballah’s reading list:

Iman Mersal, Traces of Enayat, (trans. Robin Moger)

                              How To Mend: Motherhood and Its Ghosts (trans. Robin Moger)

Abdelfattah Kilito, Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language, (trans. Waïl S. Hassan)

Laila Lalami, The Moor’s Account

The host in this episode is Åshild Lappegård Lahn

Editing and production by the House of Literature

Music by Ibou Cissokho

The House of Literature’s project to promote African literature is supported by NORAD.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 the seven novels making up his family saga, he portrays the social structures that are the basis for the violence he experienced as a child, as well as his ambivalence towards his own family and the wider working class. However, he is most ruthless when exposing his own life and flaws.

Louis has two new novels out this year: Collapse and Monique Escapes. In Collapse, Louis explores his older brother’s decline, one he both feared and came to for safety, and who died, aged 38, after a life of alcoholism, poverty, neglect and self-inflicted violence.

In Monique Escapes, he portrays his mother’s escape from yet another destructive and violent relationship, marked by alcohol and degrading treatment. The novel depicts her struggle to find a way out when she has neither money, an education certificate nor a driver’s license.

In both novels, Louis explores how social and economic structures shapes and limits people’s possibilities to create a free life. “The most political thing I do, is portray that which is invisible,” Louis said last time he visited the House of Literature. He returned now to talk about completing his family saga, his literary ruthlessness and the way ahead. He was joined by writer colleague and critic Erlend Loe, who has followed Louis’s body of work closely.

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Les livres d'Ernaux sont à la fois une archéologie personnelle et une analyse sociologique, et montrent comment ce qui est profondément personnel, aussi toujours est politique. La double conscience de classe occupe une place centrale dans son expérience et son œuvre. Elle s'est décrite comme une « émigrante de classe » ou une « transfuge de classe », quelqu'un qui a quitté le monde de la classe ouvrière sans pour autant trouver complètement sa place dans la bourgeoisie.

Cet automne, Ernaux a deux nouvelles publications en norvégien, toutes deux traduites par Henninge Margrethe Solberg. L'Autre fille est écrite comme une lettre à la sœur qu'elle n'a jamais rencontrée, un texte sur le manque, la culpabilité et comment le silence familial peut être aussi formateur que ce qui est effectivement dit. Dans Les Armoires vides, le premier roman d'Ernaux de 1974, s'établit la voix implacable et profondément existentielle qui devait marquer toute son œuvre. Y est racontée l'histoire d'une jeune femme qui tente de surmonter l'expérience d'un avortement illégal, et qui doit démêler le passé pour comprendre comment son éducation a façonné son identité.

De retour à la Maison de littérature, Ernaux a rencontré Kjerstin Aukrust, maître de conférences en littérature française à l’Université d’Oslo, pour une conversation sur la classe, le travail de mémoire et sur comment l'écriture peut devenir une forme d'archéologie de sa propre vie.

La conversation a eu lieu dans la Salle des fêtes de l'Université d’Oslo.

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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 author and journalist Omar El Akkad. For El Akkad, born in Egypt and raised in Qatar, the West long represented the polar opposite to everything he hated about the Middle East: The corruption, the censorship, the surveillance, the exaltation of corrupt leaders.

As a teenager, El Akkad moved with his family to North America, and became a part of the liberal Western world order. Despite a few reservations, he kept his faith in the West as a region committed to human rights, freedom, justice and respect for the law. Until October 8th, 2023, when Israel launched their latest war against Gaza.

The essay collection One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a reckoning with what El Akkad considers to be the West’s double standards. He exposes rhetoric and euphemisms that allow murder on innocent civilians, that necessitates the new acronym WCNSF (wounded child, no surviving family), and shows how the Gaza war is part of a longer history of us versus them.

Omar El Akkad is an award-winning author and journalist of many years. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is his first non-fiction book, it has garnered broad attention and is under translation into a number of languages.

At the House of Literature, El Akkad was joined by author and journalist Yohan Shanmugaratnam for a conversation about anger, the suffering in Gaza and Western double standards.

The event was supported by NORAD.

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Both in her novels and in her non-fiction, she explores what it means to be a woman and a feminist in the world today, and through her own books as well as the many aspiring writers she mentors and influences, she contributes to a greater diversity of stories and literary voices.

In her new novel, Dream Count, we follow four women who, each in their own way, come up against societal expectations and limits as to what women can do and ask for. Chiamaka spends the pandemic lockdown recounting all her failed relationships, Zikora tries to track down her ex, who left her when she became pregnant, Omelogor starts a blog addressed to men, and the maid Kadiatou tries to carve out a new life for herself and her daughter in the US.

Weaving together their histories, and in close portraits of the four women, Adichie explores female experiences such as society’s expecations for when you are to marry and have children, darker themes like abortion and female genital mutilation, but also female solidarity and sisterhood.

Since her literary debut in 2003, Chimamanda Adichie has become a literary and feminist icon, and she has introduced African literature to readers across the world.

She has been awarded the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, the Orange Prize and the US National Book Critics Circle Award, just to mention a few. Her books have been translated into more than 30 languages.

In Oslo, she was joined by journalist and editor Jessika Gedin for a conversation about women’s experiences, society’s expectations and the universal need to be loved.

The conversation took place in the University of Oslo’s Ceremonial Hall and was supported by NORAD.

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This is Talabi’s reading list:

-       Nnedi Okorafor, Lagoon

-       Kojo Laing, Woman of the Aeroplanes

-       Lauren Beukes, Zoo City

-       Tade Thompson, Rosewater

-       Tlotlo Tsamaase, Womb City

-       T. L. Huchu, Library of the Dead

He also mentions:

-       Ben Okri

-       Chinua Achebe

-       Wole Soyinka

-       Carmen Maria Machado

-       Arthur C. Clarke

-       Isaac Asimov

-       Larry Niven, Ringworld

-       Jerry Pournelle

-       Cyprian Ekwensi

-       Flora Nwapa

-       Pemi Aguda, Ghostroots

-       Amos Tutuola, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and The Palm-Wine Drinkard

The host in this episode is Daniel Røkholt.

Editing and production by the House of Literature.

Music by Ibou Cissokho.

The House of Literature’s project to promote African literature is supported by NORAD.

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The story is told by Nour. When his mother dies, he starts cleaning out her things in the attic, and soon discovers a far more complex portrait of the woman he thought he knw. From her forced marriage to a far older man in the 50s – whom she left, via a liberated French student and a pious, religious mother to a radical activist during the 2011 revolution.

His mother’s many faces mirror the changing history of Egypt, as well as the limitations and possibilities for women through that turbulent time.

At the House of Literature, Rakha is joined by Teresa Pepe, Professor of Arabic literature at the University of Oslo, for a conversation about Egyptian history, revolutions, mothers and sons.

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Teresa Pepe is professor of Arabic literature at the University of Oslo. Her research has focused on Arabic literature and culture during and after the Arab Spring. She is the author of the book Blogging from Egypt: Digital Literature, and editor of several collective volumes, including Arabic Literature in a Posthuman World.

In this talk, she will examine how Arabic culture has evolved since the 2011 uprisings. She will illustrate how authors such as Ahmed Naji, Mohammed Rabie, Basma Abd el-Aziz, and Alaa Abd al-Fattah employ dystopian and horrific narratives to reflect a world that is rapidly shifting due to ecological and technological changes while political crackdowns, wars, and violence are on the rise.

These are the books Pepe focuses on in her lecture, all available in English translations:

Ahmed Naji, Using Life

Mohammad Rabie, Otared

Basm Abdel Aziz, The Queue

Alaa Abd Al-Fattah, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated

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How have these experiences shaped their writing? All three writers explore the quest for freedom, whether on a personal or a collective level.

Can we talk about a post-Arab Spring literature, or is that merely a handy label for the West?

«Just like Arab Muslim lives, Arab Muslim writing is not worth the civilized world’s attention,» Rakha wrote in an essay in Guernica last year.

Soukaina Habiballah is the award-winning author of four poetry collections, a short story collection, a novel and a play, Nini Ya Momo.

Youssef Rakha was selected among the Hay Festival’s best Arabic writers under 40 in 2009. He is the author of a number of critically acclaimed novels and poetry, most recently the novel The Dissenters.

Leïla Slimani is one of the most prominent literary voices in Frankophone literature today. She won the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 2016 for her novel Lullaby, and has excited critics with her trilogy of a French-Moroccan family saga.

Habiballah, Rakha and Slimani was joined by journalist and critic Helene Hovden Hareide for a conversation about freedom and revolutions, about the power of literature for readers, authors and for moving the world forward.

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In a postcolonial East Africa in the early 1990s, marked by global change, we meet the oy Badar. He is sent away from his foster parents in Zanzibar to serve a rich family on the mainland, in Dar es Salaam. He feels inferior and ignorant, but is soon embraced by the son of the house, Karim. When Badar is later accused of stealing from his employer, he gets to move in with Karim and his fiancée, Fauzia.

In a finely tuned and precise language, Gurnah portrays the deeply human experiences of the three young people, through trials and tribulations as they grow up, and he explores human relations with characteristic empathy and eye for alienation.

Abdulrazak Gurnah is professor of postcolonial literature, and the author of eleven novels, among them the critically acclaimed Paradise and Afterlives. Gurnah is a master of allusion, and in an understated language, he creates recognizable, flawed characters, always with a keen eye for those feeling like outsiders.

One who has followed Gurnah’s writing for years, and also been mentored by him herself, is author and historian Nadifa Mohamed. She joined Gurnah for a conversation about theft and trust, betrayal and belonging.

The conversation took place the University of Oslo’s Ceremonial Hall.

The event is supported by NORAD.

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We follow the Belhaj family through three generations, from when Mathilde leaves France to follow her new husband Amine to his home country Morocco after the second world war, and their struggle to find their place between two cultures that are rather hostile to each other, to their daughter, Aïcha through her childhood in Morocco and studies in France, before the last book takes the story up to our time through Aïcha’s daughter Mia.

This epic family saga contains love stories and sex, violence and racism, while the family’s path is continually affected by the historical currents of Morocco and the wider world. French Mathilde grapple with the strict role for women in the Moroccan countryside, while her daughter Aïcha feels ogled and set apart as a Moroccan in France. In a vibrant and immediate language, Slimani portrays the various family members’ struggles to belong, and to create a home and a family.

Leïla Slimani is one of the most central Francophone authors today. Her definitive breakthrough came with the award-winning thriller Lullaby, for which she was awarded the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 2016. She has written a number of critically acclaimed novels and non fiction titles.

Slimani was joined by associate professor of French literature, Kjerstin Aukrust, for a conversation about home, belonging and a family history.

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In her writing, Erpenbeck combines an acute awareness of history with succinct prose and a daring sense of form and composition. Through short stories, essays, plays and a host of critically acclaimed novels, she explores themes such as identity and memory and shows us the human costs of totalitarian regimes. How does the past continue to shape our present and future?

Now, Erpenbeck is joined by author and editor Mattis Øybø at the House of Literature for a conversation on a dark and burning European history.

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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 work nights in the Parisian underground.

Three generations of immigrants tell their stories in Standing Heavy, the sensational debut novel from author Armand Patrick Gbaka-Bredé, better known as GauZ’. With playful language, an eventful plot, and tons of observational humour, Standing Heavy is a devilish comedy about France’s colonial heritage seen through the eyes of the service class.

GauZ’ is a French-Ivorian author, editor and publisher based in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. The novel Debout-Payé was lauded by critics when it was released in 2014, and in 2023 the English translation was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.

At the House of Literature, GauZ’ meets author and journalist Yohan Shanmugaratnam for a conversation on class, capitalism and the security guard.

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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 together lost empires, colonial plunder, modern conflicts, and the study of water in a plot stretching from ancient time to the present. With thrill, humour and evocative language, There Are Rivers in the Sky is both enthralling and fascinating, and has been lauded by authors such as Ian McEwan, Arundhati Roy and Mary Beard.

Turkish-British Elif Shafak is one of the world’s foremost writers of historical fiction. Through her fourteen novels, she has explored cultural tensions and socioeconomic inequalities between East and West in historical and contemporary settings. She has also been an active champion of the freedom of speech and of human rights, particularly women’s rights, an activism evident in both her fiction and non-fiction. She lives in London in self-imposed exile, after past and continuing threats in Turkey against her work as an author.

At the House of Literature, Shafak meets author and journalist Marte Spurkland for a conversation on time, cultural conflicts, and the memory of water.

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This is Makumbi’s reading list:

Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

Yvonne Battle-Felton, Curdle Creek

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

                           Arrow of Good

Ngugi wa Thiong’o

Wole Soyinka

Namwali Serpell, The Old Drift

                            The Furrows

Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, Stay With Me

Ayesha Haruna Attah, The Hundred Wells of Salaga

Leila Aboulela, Lyrics Alley

                        River Spirit

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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 the West Indies. They fought for a shared, Black identity, for decolonization of the African continent, and for the Black diaspora to return to Africa to strengthen the continent – with some even calling for a United States of Africa.

What role has panafricanism played in the fight for independence in different African countries, and in the creation of Black art, culture and identity? And what is the significance of the new wave of panafricanism today?

Hakim Adi is an award-winning professor of history and writer, and the first historian with African roots to become a professor of history in the UK. In this lecture, he will provide a broad introduction to the history of panafricanism.

The event was part of Black History Month Norway.

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Neige Sinno's Sad Tiger can be read as part of this line of publications, while also giving the conversation a literary context. While it is necessary to denounce abuse, doing so is also a burden, and Sinno’s approach to dealing with her own story is to turn to fiction. Through analysis of literary works by authors like Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison and Virginie Despentes, she explores power and powerlessness, cultural bias, and finding a language to talk about these experiences.

Neige Sinno is a French author and doctor of American literature. Sad tiger is her literary breakthrough, both in France and internationally. A bestseller and the winner of a long list of literary prizes, including Prix Femina, Prix Littéraire Le Monde, and Prix Goncourt des lycéens, the book has been endorsed by authors like Annie Ernaux and Kathrine Nedrejord.

Hadia Tajik is a Norwegian politician for Arbeiderpartiet, with a background in journalism, human rights, and law. She will meet Sinno for a conversation on abuse culture and misuse of authority, and how to use fiction as a gateway to shared experiences.

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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 beginnings and until the present day. Here, he reflects on the influence and importance of the genre, citing its central works and defining its distinguishing features.

Wole Talabi is a Nigerian engineer and author of speculative fiction currently living in Perth, Australia. His published works include the short story collections Incomplete Solutions (2019) and Convergence Problems (2024), as well as the novel Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon (2023), which won the Nommo award for best novel in 2024. His short stories have been nominated for and won several awards, including the Sidewise, Nommo and Locus awards, as well as being awarded the Caine Prize for African Writing.

Talabi also compiled a database of published works of African speculative fiction, which he edited from 2015 to 2021. He is also the editor of several anthologies of African speculative fiction, including the landmark publication Africanfuturism. An Anthology (2020) and remains one of the field’s chief advocates and central thinkers.

Works mentioned:

Early Works (1930s – 1960s):

Jean-Louis Njemba Medou – Nnanga Kon (1932)

Muhammadu Bello Kagara – Gandoki (1934)

D.O. Fagunwa – Forest of a Thousand Daemons (1938)

Amos Tutuola – The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952)

Post-Independence Flourish (1960s – early 2000s):

Sony Labou Tansi – Life and A Half (1979)

Buchi Emecheta – The Rape of Shavi (1983)

Kojo Laing – Woman of the Aeroplanes (1988)

Ben Okri – The Famished Road (1991)

Kojo Laing – Major Gentl and Achimota Wars (1992)

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o – The Wizard of the Crow (2004/2006)

The Internet Age and Genre Recognition (early 2000s – early 2010’s)

Nnedi Okorafor – Zahrah the Windseeker (2005)

Ahmed Khaled Towfik – Utopia (2008)

Lauren Beukes – Moxyland (2008)

Lauren Beukes – Zoo City (2010)

Nnedi Okorafor – Who Fears Death (2010)

Ivor Hartmann (ed.) – Afro SF (2012)

Increasing Global Recognition (2010s – present):

Deji Bryce Olukotun – Nigerians in Space (2014)

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi – Kintu (2014)

Tade Thompson – Rosewater (2016)

Tochi Onyebuchi – Beasts Made of Night (2017)

Akwaeke Emezi – Freshwater (2018)

Namwali Serpell – The Old Drift (2019)

Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki – Ife-Iyoku, the Tale of Imadeyunuagbon (2020)

Other works mentioned:

Chinua Achebe – Things Fall Apart (1958)

Helen Oyeyemi – The Icarus Girl (2005)

Wole Talabi – Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon (2023)

Weird Tales, fantasy and horror magazine

Jungle Jim, bi-monthly African pulp fiction magazine

Omenana Speculative fiction magazine

Black Panther (dir. Ryan Coogler, 2018)

“Afro-mythology and African futurism”, essay by Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum

Nnedi Okorafor – “Spider the Artist”

Phoenix, publishing imprint at Ouida Books

Mother, publishing imprint by Jacana Media

Chikodili Emelumadu – Dazzling (2023)

Yvette Lisa Ndlovu – Drinking from Graveyard Wells (2023)

Pemi Aguda – Ghostroots (2024)

Tlotlo Tsamaase – Womb City (2024)

Suyi Davies Okungbowa – Warrior of The Wind (2023)

T. L. Huchu – The Library of The Dead (2021)

The Sauúti collective

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This is the current situation, as described by Anne Applebaum in Autocracy, Inc., her new book on the hidden network of autocrats and autocratic regimes that has blossomed since the turn of the century. In the book, Applebaum describes the golden age of dictatorship as she charts the political and economic ties that unite the dictators of the world – often with democratic states as useful idiots or direct facilitators.

Anne Applebaum is one of the world’s foremost authors of history books, among others The Iron Curtain and the groundbreaking Red Famine. Stalin’s War with Ukraine. As a journalist and writer, she is a central voice in the U.S. and Eastern European political scenes and a fierce critic of Western states’ moves away from democratic values and principles.

Nils August Andresen is a historian and editor of the newspaper Minerva. Since his days as a student in Russia, he has been particularly interested in Putin’s rise to power and the threats towards international order.

Applebaum met Andresen on stage for a conversation on the new world order – and how they’re getting away with it.

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Makumbi’s novel is an epic family saga, taking us through the history of Uganda – from the kingdom of Buganda before the arrival of the Europeans, and up to today’s society, in which she combines myths and Biblical history with fairytales and oral storytelling tradition. In a distilled, lyrical language, we meet the patriarch Kintu in the mid-eighteenth century, when he is subject to a dark curse, before we follow his many descendants into our own time, where they all, in different ways, struggle with curses of their own. We particularly see how the men of the family struggle to live up to society’s masculine ideals. Maybe this is the real curse, affecting each of their lives and slowly poisoning the entire society?

Kintu is Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s first novel, published in 2014 after she won a manuscript competition by Kenyan Kwani Trust. Makumbi has since published the short story collection Manchester Happened and the novel The First Woman, and she has won a number of awards for her writing.

At the House of Literature, she is joined by author and creative director for the organization Radical Books Collective, Bhakti Shringarpure, for a conversation about a family and a nation, about curses and consolation.

The event was supported by NORAD.

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Enter Ghost is a complex and skillfully composed novel, an exploration of identity and belonging, the role of art, community, and the painful story of a family and a people.

Isabella Hammad is a British-Palestinian author. Her debut novel The Parisian won a number of awards, including the Betty Trask Award and the Palestine Book Award, and I 2023, she was included on Granta’s prestigious list of Best young British Novelists. Enter Ghost is her second novel.

Priya Bains is a poet, an activist and editor of the literary magazine Vinduet. She will join Hammad for a conversation about ghosts and sisters, Hamlet and the occupation.

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On the other side of the Wall, author Jenny Erpenbeck grew up in the east, the German Democratic Republic (DDR), experiencing the country’s zenith as well as its disintegration and the victorious capitalist West just a few years later. In her award winning body of work, Erpenbeck has gone on to explore the complex history of Germany and greater Europe, where ordinary citizens become hostages to the grand ideas and ruptures of the times.

Both Atwood and Erpenbeck are concerned with totalitarianism, with history and how it informs the present and the future, with our fragile normality, and how quickly it can turn into brutality. While they write lyrical and innovative fiction - incorporating mythology, literature and philosophy - the links to the world around us, either past, present or futures we are headed towards, are always there.

Margaret Atwood has published more than 70 books of poetry, short story collections, novels, children’s books,and essay collections. Stories like The Handmaid’s Tale and the MaddAddam trilogy have made her a name across the world, and a number of her books have been adapted to film, TV, opera and ballet, and, like Erpenbeck, she is regularly mentioned as a favorite for the Nobel prize in literature.

Jenny Erpenbeck is the author of a number of critically acclaimed and award winning novels, short story collections, plays and essays. Her latest novel, Kairos, won the 2024 International Booker Prize.

In this event, these two exceptional authors met for the first time on stage, for a conversation about history and society, memory and hope for the future. The conversation was moderated by Helge Jordheim, professor of cultural history at the University of Oslo.

The conversation took place on November 2st, 2024 in The University of Oslo's Ceremonial Hall. 

LitHouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers.

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In her literature, Atwood is mischievous, fearless and original, frequently incorporating elements from classical texts, fairytales and works by writers like William Shakespeare or George Orwell. While her books often include elements from historical events, they also suggest new worlds and possibilities for the future.

Atwood was joined by journalist and writer Karin Haugen for a conversation about the past and the present, prophetic stories and her unique body of work.

This conversation was hosted by The House of Literature in Oslo and took place on October 31st, 2024 at the Oslo Opera House.

LitHouse is a podcast from The House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers.

Music by Apothek.

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This is the argument of Senegalese academic Felwine Sarr in his book Afrotopia, which has had great influence in academic as well as public discourse. In it, he explores the possibility of a new Africa, with the help of African thinkers, artists and philosophic traditions. Africa needs a utopia, a goal to strive towards, without comparing themselves to others, Sarr says. How might such an afrotopia look?

Felwine Sarr is a leading academic and a prominent voice in public discourse. He is professor in economics at the Gaston-Berger University in Senegal, and professor of French and francophone studies at Duke University, USA, as well as a musician and the author of several novels. Together with the philosopher Achille Mbembe, he has established Les Ateliers De La Pensée, which gathers academics and writers from across Africa and the diaspora. In 2018, commissioned by President Emmanuel Macron, Sarr and the French art historian Bénédicte Savoy authored a seminal report on repatriation of African cultural artifacts from French museums.

Andreas Liebe Delsett is a writer and former artistic director at the House of Literature, currently working on a book about South Africa's recent history.

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Cusk is a truly innovative writer, pushing the boundaries of the form for each new publication. Already in 2008, when she published her brutally honest depiction of motherhood A Life’s Work, she was miles ahead of contemporary feminist discourse. Her Outline trilogy was considered by many critics a revolution of the novel form.

Her latest novel Parade is no different. Here, Cusk continues her exploration of unconventional structures, delving into the lives of a number of artists all referred to with the initial G. Their stories are told through a nameless narrator moving seamlessly in and out of the different tales. The result is a boldly composed exploration of the role of the artist and what drives someone to create art, a novel about how both art and artist are shaped by society’s gaze. In Parade, Cusk dissects interpersonal relationships and existential questions with precision and clarity.

In The University of Oslo's Ceremonial Hall, Cusk will be joined by journalist and publisher Jessika Gedin, for a conversation about the connections between art and life, about gender roles, the artist and how we human beings are able to live side by side.

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Far less attention is given to the fact that across the world, writers are prosecuted and jailed for their supposed dissidence to autocratic regimes. Turkey is among the world leaders in its number of jailed authors, a trend that increases wherever war and conflict can form a forgiving political climate.

What is the effect of political persecution on individual writers? And how does such a climate affect the writers who remain “free”?

For decades, Yasemin Çongar has been one of Turkey’s most renowned journalists and oppositional voices to the Turkish regime. Since 2016, she has herself been on trial for her journalism, and is still fighting a lengthy prison sentence.

In 2018, Çongar also founded the Kıraathane literature house in Istanbul, where she worked as director until March 2023. At Kıraathane, as well as through her work as a translator and writer, Çongar has helped raise awareness of the challenges faced by writers today.

Now, Çongar visits the House of Literature for a philosophical and personal lecture on freedom, creativity, and the transcendent power of literature.

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This is Igoni Barrett's reading list:

• Abdulrazak Gurnah, Afterlives (Etterliv)
• Zoe Wicomb, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (Ingen går seg vill i Cape Town)
• Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (De blåeste øyne)

                                   Jazz

• Alex Haley, Roots (Røtter)
• Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (Usynlig mann)
• Yambo Ouloguem, Le devoir de violence (Bound To Violence)
• Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, La plus secrète mémoire des hommes (Menneskenes mest fordekte minne)

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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 him readers across the globe. In his most recent book, The World – A Family History of Humanity, his focus is no less than the entire world history, told through some of the most central family dynasties.

More than an ambitious and grand project, Montefiore’s latest colossal publication is also an exploration and re-thinking of how we tell history. “World history often has themes, not people; biography has people, not themes,” as he writes in the book’s introduction.

By emphasizing the family, he is able to combine the two – the great historical events with the stories of the people in the midst of it all. He also gives more space to the role of women, and tells parts of the world’s history that might not be as well known among most Norwegian and European readers, such as Sundiata Keita’s kingdom in Mali, Itzcoatl and the founding of the Aztek kingdom, and Ashoka and the Mauyrya empire in ancient India.

Diving into world history with Montefiore on stage is Shazia Majid, award-winning journalist and author of the book Ut av skyggene (“Out of the Shadows”), about the first generation of Pakistani migrant workers in Norway.

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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 respective engagements with anger and madness.

For many feminist critics, Bertha Mason, Jane Eyre’s “mad woman in the attic, encapsulates the fury of women excluded (or expelled) by patriarchal structures. In this lecture, Denise DeCaires Narain argues that the unique forms that Rhys and Kincaid deploy give shape to that fury in productive and stylish ways.

Denise DeCaires Narain has worked at the University of Sussex for a number of years, where her research has focused especially on Caribbean writers and postcolonial literature. In this lecture, she offers a unique introduction to two of the most prominent writers from the Caribbean: Jean Rhys and Jamaica Kincaid.

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This is Leila Aboulela’s reading list:

• Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King
• Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North

                             The Wedding of Zein

• Naguib Mahfouz, The Cairo Trilogy (Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street)

                              The Thief and the dogs

• Ahdaf Soueif, In the Eye of the Sun
• Fatin Abbas, Ghost Season
• Isabella Hammad, The Parisian

                              Enter Ghost

In this podcast series the House of Literature in Oslo, Norway invites writers and thinkers to talk about their work, what they read and present their reading list from the African continent and diaspora.

Host in this episode Åshild Lappegård Lahn

Editing and production by the House of Literature

Music by Ibou Cissokho

The House of Literature’s project to promote African literature is supported by NORAD.

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Her Lucy novels tell stories about exposedness, poverty, grief and childhood trauma, but also about the value of hope, art and love. Lucy grows up in a poor and dysfunctional family in the Illinois countryside and becomes a writer against all odds. Through her village upbringing and different periods in Lucy’s life, the novels depicts her slow awakening as a writer, someone who tells stories, who gives the world meaning through language.

In Strout’s novels and short stories, the great drama unfolds within unassuming everyday life. The emotional lives of ordinary people are portrayed with depth, warmth and complexity, while she simultaneously shows a keen eye for the larger societal structures and systems of which we, consciously or unconsciously, are part.

At the House of Literature, Strout is joined by writer Kjersti Annesdatter Skomsvold for a conversation about family, community and change.

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This year, Strout’s debut novel, Amy and Isabelle, is finally available in Norwegian (translated by Hilde Rød-Larsen). 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; My Name Is Lucy Barton, Anything Is Possible, Lucy by the Sea and Oh, William! – which have earned Strout a reputation of an unafraid and deeply thoughtful writer.

«You can’t write fiction and be careful,» Strout has said. Growing up in a small, rural town with a strict family – similarly to her beloved character Lucy Barton – books were miracles and refuges – places in which she realized she was not alone.

In this personal lecture, Strout will talk about her journey from when she first started to write, and to becoming a published author, highlighting some of the authors and books that have shaped and influenced her along the way, such as Alice Munro, Eudora Welty and Ernest Hemingway. A constant observer of those around her, she will talk about where she finds inspiration for her characters and how she learned to throw caution to the wind.

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The novel The Fathership depicts a brutal childhood characterized by violence, betrayals and toxic masculinity, but that also has a tenderness and love for the families and working class community portrayed. The novel was praised by the literary establishment, and the following year, Bech published Jeg anerkænder ikke længere jeres autoritet (“I no longer recognize your authority”), a furious manifesto about class struggle, the proletariat and the elite. In a self-scrutinizing, loud and emphatic prose, Bech rails against class contempt and the economic blind spots within the cultural middle class, showing the reader what it is like to be exposed, gay and poor.

Masculinity, homophobia and class are central issues in British poet and author Andrew McMillan’s critically acclaimed debut novel Pity. The book portrays three generations of men, spanning from the heyday of the coal industry, with long days of back-breaking labour in the mines, to a present characterized by unemployment and loneliness. In a sparse but urgent tone and with an eye for the raw and vulnerable, McMillan explores today’s gender roles for men, and how the past affects the present. At the same time, the book is a tribute to the working class and an invitation to reflection, change and acceptance.

McMillan and Bech are joined by writer and journalist Kristofer Folkhammar for a conversation about poverty, class and toxic gender roles.

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This can be said to be the starting point for the novels of Sudanese-Scottish Leila Aboulela and Ethiopian-American Maaza Mengiste, both writing about historical events in their home countries.

The backdrop in Aboulela’s new novel River Spirit is the dramatic time in the Sudan’s history in the late 19th century. In the span of just a few years, the country underwent several occupations, as well as a bloody revolution led by a man claiming to be al-Mahdi (the Islamic Messiah). Through a multitude of voices from different sides of the conflicts, and with the young orphaned girl Akuany as a turning point, Aboulela leads us through a central historical time in the Sudan.

A young, poor woman is also central in Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King, telling the story of 1935 Ethiopia invaded by Mussolini’s Italy. Told from as different perspectives as Ethiopia’s emperor Haile Selassie, the Italian soldier Ettore and the servant girl Hirut, the novel offers a complex picture of the events. Mengiste has emphasized that she was particularly interested in exploring women’s role in the resistance movement.

Mengiste was born in Ethiopia, and is currently living in the United States. She has explored Ethiopia’s recent history in both her critically acclaimed novels Beneath the Lion’s Gaze and The Shadow King, with the latter shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize. Mengiste has also made her mark as a photographer and an essayist.

Aboulela was born in the Sudan, today she lives in Scottland. She has published a number of award winning novels, short story collections and plays. River Spirit is the first novel in a planned series exploring Scotland’s role in the British colonization of the Sudan.

At the House of Literature, Aboulela and Mengiste meet writer and creative director of the Radical Books Collective, Bhakti Shringarpure, for a conversation about writing historical fiction, and about foregrounding the stories of women and ordinary people within big historical events.

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In present-day Ramallah, a young woman discovers these events through a small newspaper story. It catches her attention because the events took place exactly 25 years before the day she was born. The woman becomes compelled to find out what actually happened in that desert, and embarks upon a highly dangerous journey to come to the bottom of the story.

Adania Shibli is a critically acclaimed Palestinian writer, and holds a PhD in media and cultural studies. She has published three novels in Arabic, and Minor Detail is the first to be translated into Norwegian. While slim in size, the novel contains far more than the modest number of pages would suggest. Shibli explores themes such as belonging and loss, depicting the everyday absurdities under a normalized occupation. Shibli’s language is precise and sparse, the story concise. The many gaps in the story creates a tension, quivering beneath the surface and increasing by each page.

The novel was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021, and in 2023, it won the prestigious German LiBeraturpreis. However, they chose to postpone the award ceremony indefinitely after Hamas’s terror attack on October 7th and Israel’s following war on Gaza, a decision met with extensive criticism internationally.

At the House of Literature, Shibli will meet writer colleague Maaza Mengiste for a conversation about language, the past, borders and all the minor details that make up our reality.

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Throughout history, authors in particular have been made the object of the limitations set by powerful institutions, be it by explicit decree or through the trepidations felt at writing challenging or shocking literature.

Few know this landscape better than historian, author and critic Ian Buruma. He has written a host of books on East Asian (especially Chinese and Japanese) culture and history, the West and Islam, and European history, including this year’s The Collaborators. Buruma is also highly respected columnist and critic for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, the latter of which he also served as editor-in-chief.

This evening, Buruma will give an introductory lecture on how censorship has shaped culture and the arts in both Eastern and Western countries, before being interviewed by author and professor of cultural history at the University of Oslo, Helge Jordheim. He will join Buruma on stage for a conversation on how threats to expression have changed over time, and the challenges that writers face today.

This event marks the beginning of The House of Literature’s series on “Forbidden books”, which sheds light on the ways in which literature is made forbidden, censored, or otherwise suppressed, historically and today.

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Shy is a compositionally ambitious and lyrical character study with troubled youth as its subject. Through frequent flashbacks and interjections, Shy provides us with glimpses of a difficult childhood leading to a young man at the verge of self-annihilation. Shy is a tender story of depression and not being able to fit in, told with great compassion and nuance. At the same time, the novel is a fervent ode to the outsiders of the 90s and to the culture and music that embraced them, those who no one else wanted.

Max Porter is a British author and editor at the publishing house Granta. With his experimental and innovative novels, in particular Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, he has established himself as one of his generation’s most exciting voices and acquired a large readership among critics and with the general public. Even other writers like Douglas Stuart, PJ Harvey and George Saunders have expressed their admiration for Porter and his trilogy of novels on boyhood, which Shy now completes.

Another writer who has followed Porter’s career with curiosity and excitement is Norwegian author and editor at Tiden, Mattis Øybø. He will meet Porter for a conversation on Shy, masculinity and how best to bring the outsiders back in.

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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 writer Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai explores in her novel The Mountains Sing, in which we alternately follow the girl Huong and her grandmother Diệu Lan.

While the rest of the family has been scattered across the country, Huong and Diệu Lan tries to make it through the days with the help of stories. Huong disappears into books like Pinocchio and Treasure Island, or listens to her grandmother sharing her life story, where Nguyễn takes us through the history of Vietnam in the last hundred years, from a colony under Japan and the brutal reforms of the communist regime in the 1950s and through the horrific years of the Vietnam war. Is reconciliation at all possible after decades of abuse and with families torn apart?

Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai has published a number of poetry collections in Vietnamese, and in The Mountains Sing, her first novel in English, this background from poetry is clearly visible. She balances the dark story with a vivid and lyrical language, and through the novel’s chorus of voices, she challenges the black and white picture we know from history books and Hollywood movies. The novel has been met with critical acclaim, and won her the International Book Award and the PEN Oakland/ Josephine Miles Literary Award.

When Nguyễn visited the House of Literature, she was joined by translator and artistic advisor for the Norwegian Festival of Literature, Yukiko Duke, for a conversation about memories, reconciliation and Vietnam’s bloody history.

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Rafael Pinto is a young Jewish apothecary in Sarajevo, Bosnia, with big dreams and a penchant for opium. One summer day in 1914 he witnesses the assassination of archduke Franz Ferdinand, and suddenly Pinto is thrust into life as a soldier in the Great War. There he meets Osman, a handsome Muslim soldier who charms Pinto with his bravery and talent for storytelling, and between them blossoms a boundless love which shall follow them through the war and to the ends of the Earth.

Aleksandar Hemon’s The World and All That It Holds is a grandiose historical novel that combines historical fact with a rich and fabulous prose. With events set in a multicultural Europe in great social upheaval, Hemon deploys a distinctly lyrical prose, mixing in languages and expressions from all corners and cultures, showing a broad history and a multiform world. The result is a highly original, yet archetypal story of undying love and one man’s fight to save something worth living for as the world as he knows it is collapsing around him.

Bosnian American Aleksander Hemon is one of the most central authors of his generation. With novels such as The Lazarus Project and Nowhere Man, alongside his many short stories, Hemon has written himself into the contemporary American canon and garnered readers all over the world. This year, he returns with The World and All That It Holds, perhaps his most ambitious project yet.

In conversation with Hemon is renowned author, critic, and editor John Freeman. He has long followed Hemon’s career as a writer and metHemon on stage for a conversation on love in wartime and the explosive power of literature.

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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 which the writing of history can become the falsification of history: The Dutchman and the spy were both remembered as martyrs, while the masseuse was awarded the Red Cross Medal barely three years after the end of the war.

Why were these people exempted from post-war reckoning and social stigma? How are they remembered today, and what do they tell us about how history is written and remembered?

Ian Buruma is a Dutch historian, author and professor of human rights and journalism. In over four decades he has written popular and respected books on culture and history, with special emphasis on Europe, Japan and China. With books such as Year Zero. A History of 1945 and The Wages of Guilt. Memories of War in Germany and in Japan, Buruma has explored Western and Eastern history writing and mythologisation of traitors and interlopers. The Collaborators adds to this with its empathic and well-written portrait of three complex characters from the Second World War.

Journalist and author Marte Michelet put the question of guilt among Norway’s resistance movement on the agenda with her book What Did the Home Front Know?, which became the centre of much debate. She has read and enjoyed the Collaborators and met Buruma on stage for a conversation on injustice, guilt, and the writing of history.

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Author NoViolet Bulawayo has drawn inspiration both from George Orwell’s classic Animal Farm and the African tradition of animal fables in her allegorical story of Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe’s fall.

In a bubbling and playful language, where satirical quips, twitter updates and razor sharp observations all follow each other, Bulawayo tells the story of the coup against Mugabe as it plays out among the animals on the Seat of Power as well as among the public. Through the goat Destiny, returned after years in exile, we get an outsider’s view on the events, and in a vivid mother-daughter portrait, we follow Destiny and her mother in a journey back to a part of the country’s bloody history that has long been silenced.

The result is a masterly satirical story in which Bulawayo explores universal themes such as freedom and repression, hope and justice, showing us how the story is relevant far beyond the borders of Zimbabwe, in a world where authoritarianism is on the rise.

Writer NoViolet Bulawayo is the first African woman to appear on the prestigious Booker list twice, first for her 2013 debut We Need New Names and then for her second novel Glory in 2022. She has taught creative writing at Stanford for many years, and her own writing has earned her a number of prizes and accolades.

At the House of Literature, Bulawayo was joined by poet and writer Priya Bains for a conversation about fables and animals, literary playfulness, and Zimbabwe’s recent history.

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Through more than one hundred books spanning most genres, the American legend writes tenderly and with precision about our societies’ great questions.

«The opposite of language is silence and silence for human beings is death», Oates said after receiving the prestigious National Book Award for her 1969 novel Them. The novel is considered one of her major works, and will now be available in Norwegian translation for the first time. In Them, we follow a forking class family living under harsh conditions in Detroit, from the 1930s and until the bloody race riots in 1967.

Oates has also written fiction based on real events or people, such as her best-selling novel Blonde, based on Marilyn Monroe’s life and death, which was adapted into a film in 2022. Her latest novel, Babysitter, is set in the aftermath of a number of unsolved child-killings in Detroit in the 1970s. Here, Oates explores racism, sexual harassment and institutional abuse in ways that make the story feel deeply relevant, even to today’s society marked by MeToo and Black Lives Matter.

The core of her writing, according to Oates herself, is to “be a witness” – to tell the stories of those who have no one speaking for them. She writes about racism, misogyny, violence and social injustices with a keen eye for politics and history, combined with deep psychological insight and literary precision.

Oates has won a number of literary prizes for her extensive body of work. She has been a professor of creative writing at Princeton University and UC Berkeley for many years and a central literary mentor for writers such as Jonathan Safran Foer and Mohsin Hamid.

When the author visits Norway and the House of Literature for the very first time, the event will take place in the University of Oslo’s ceremonial hall, so that as many people as possible can take part in the event. Here, she will meet writer and journalist Karin Haugen for a conversation about a long writing life and the power of literature.

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Across the world, more and more readers are discovering Gurnah’s body of work. His novels Paradise, Afterlives and Desertion explore the history of East Africa and Zanzibar, while other works, such as Admiring Silence and By the Sea, portray a migrant’s encounter with British society. What they all have in common are the memorable characters created by Gurnah, characters that are not heroes, but rather unique in their quiet everydayness, and who often feel alienated from the world around them.

Through these characters, Gurnah gives us masterful depictions of a region and its history, of the colonial era, of exile and migration. In a quiet revolution, he shifts the perspective from the familiar, Western narrative to an East African point of view, leading us into great history as seen through the eyes of ordinary people.

“Gurnah’s novels are stunningly beautiful, immersive and enticing. He exceeds all others in depicting the lives of those made small by injustice and oppression”, writer Leila Aboulela has said about Gurnah’s writing, with which she has a strong connection. Aboulela grew up in Sudan, and currently lives in Scotland. She has published a number of plays, short story collections and novels, most recently River Spirit.

Aboulela will join Abdulrazak Gurnah for a conversation about his body of work, about writing the history of East Africa, migration, colonial history, and the unique portraits of characters and relationships he gives us in his books.

The event was supported by Norad.

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Oates is a legend, and the author of more than 100 books. Known for memorable titles such as Blond, Them, Black Water, The Gravedigger’s Daughter, We Were the Mulvaneys and Babysitter. She has been a consistent favorite for the Nobel Prize of literature the last 25 years, and has been a mentor to writers such as Jonathan Safran Foer and Mohsin Hamid. In this lecture, Oates talks about the role of art and that of inspiration and the wellspring of creativity, examined through the work of contemporary writers and poets.

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This is Masande's reading list:

Imraan Coovadia, Tales of the Metric System

                          A Spy in Time

K. Sello Duiker, The Quiet Violence of Dreams

Njabulo Ndebele, Fools and Other Stories

In this podcastseries the House of Literature in Oslo, Norway invites writers and thinkers to talk about their work, what they read and present their readinglist from the African continent and diaspora. 

Host in this episode Åshild Lappegård Lahn

Editing and production by the House of Literature

Music by Ibou Cissokho

The House of Literature’s project to promote African literature is supported by NORAD.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is Maaza Mengiste’s reading list:

• Ama Ata Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy
• Maya Binyam, Hangman
• Mihret Sibhat, The History of a Difficult Child
• Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions

In this podcastseries the House of Literature in Oslo, Norway invites writers and thinkers to talk about their work, what they read and present their readinglist from the African continent and diaspora.

Host in this episode Åshild Lappegård Lahn

Editing and production by the House of Literature

Music by Ibou Cissokho

The House of Literature’s project to promote African literature is supported by NORAD.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 moving to her daily life as an adult.

Through the history of the girl, we see how South-Africa’s dark past is still shaping its present, and mirrored in a dystopian future, where environmental issues are rampant, and social issues is solved by creating work camps across the country.

In his novel Triangulum, Masande Ntshanga combines different genres in a story which illustrates, convincingly, that South-Africa’s dystopian past is far from a closed chapter.

Ntshanga is the author of two novels and a chapbook. His debut The Reactive won him the debut prize the Betty Trask Award, while Triangulum was nominated for the Nommo Award for Best Speculative Fiction Novel by and African.

At the House of Literature, Ntshanga is joined by editor and translator Julia Wiedlocha for a conversation about adolescence and technology, future dystopias, and the dark shadow of colonialism.

The event is supported by NORAD.

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Science fiction, speculative fiction and afrofuturism are literary genres on the rise on many countries, including Norway and Ntshanga’s home country, South Africa. What makes science fiction the preferred genre in which to explore possible future scenarios, or in which to pick apart contemporary power structures?

In this personal lecture, Ntshanga will talk about what science fiction literature has meant to him as a reader and writer, and about the significance of the genre for writers who want to imagine another world.

Masande Ntshanga is a South African writer, poet and editor of New Contrast Magazine. 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.

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In this talk, American author Torrey Peters will argue for finding the roots of current transfeminine literature in older works that explore the performance of masculinity, works that in fact have been popularly accepted as containing little ambivalence about the meanings of gender. The primary focus will be on Ernest Hemingway, but with slight detours into Per Petterson, Thomas Mann, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Evelyn Waugh, and the pharmacology of steroid regimens taken by extreme bodybuilders.

Torrey Peters rocketed into the international literary scene with her debut novel Detransition, Baby, a warm and intelligent exploration of gender, parenthood and trans life. The novel was among other prizes nominated for The Women’s Prize for Fiction, and is celebrated for its complex trans characters and for painting a truthful picture of the New York trans scene.

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The novel portrays Reese, a trans woman who always wanted children, her transgendered ex-partner Ames and his pregnant girlfriend. Can the three of them be parents together, and if so, what would that look like? Who are their role models? How can trans women creates good lives, when so many aspects of ordinary life are still unavailable to them?

Detransition, Baby, now available in Kirsti Vogt’s Norwegian transalation, gives a unique insight into the everyday dilemmas trans people meet. The novel was among other prizes nominated for The Women’s Prize for Fiction, and is celebrated for its complex trans characters and for painting a truthful picture of the New York trans scene.

Author and literary critic Carline Tromp will meet Peters for a conversation about gender, sexuality, family, and starting over.

The conversation will start with an introduction by Christine Marie Jentoft, adviser for gender diversity at FRI, who has been an important voice in the Norwegian trans debate for over 10 years. She received an honorary prize from PKI in 2022 for her work for equality for the lgbt+ community, and was elected Queer Role Model of the year during the 2023 Rainbow Galla.

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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 and cultural elite has left Zimbabwe, Dangarembga has staid put and fought for change. Now she debates moving countries.

Across the world, it is becoming increasingly difficult to protest governments and large corporations. Environmental activists are especially vulnerable: According to the human rights organization Global Witness, 200 environmental activists were murdered across the world in 2021 alone.

In 2016, South African activist Nonhle Mbuthuma lost a close friend and colleague. Ever since, she has lived with constant death threats in her work to protect the nature and community where she lives, on the east coast of South Africa.

Mbuthuma and Dangarembga will join for a conversation about the conditions for human rights and civil society in Zimbabwe and South Africa. How do you keep fighting for grass roots engagement and change under such perilous conditions?

Moderating the conversation is Bergdís Jóelsdóttir. She has worked with civil society and human rights initiatives in Southern Africa for a number of years, and is currently the policy director for Amnesty International Norway.

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South African Nonhle Mbuthuma has also fought for her people’s land and rights. Together with her community, the indigenous group in Pondoland, she took the Australian mining company Transworld Energy and Minerals to court – and won.

Hætta Isaksen and Mbuthuma both fight a double fight, for nature and for indigenous people’s right to their culture and traditions. For many indigenous activists, the environmental struggle is seen as an integrated part of the fight against extractivism – extracting natural resources for export and sale – and that against colonialism.

For Mbuthuma, her fight is a continuation of earlier generations’ fight for the same land, against colonial powers and the apartheid state. Mbuthuma is the founder of the organization Amadiba Crisis Committee, which is fighting for the land and community in Pondoland on the east coast of South Africa.

Ella Marie Hætta Isaksen is an activist, a musician with her band Isák, and an actress.

When the two of them meet for a conversation about environmental struggle and indigenous rights, they are joined by Silje Ask Lundberg, former president of Friends of the Earth Norway and a senior campaigner for the organization Oil Change International.

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Her debut novel Nervous Conditions was not only the first novel in English published by a Black woman in Zimbabwe, it has become a modern classic, and in 2018, it figured on BBC’s “100 books that changed the world”. That same year, the third book in the trilogy, This Mournable Body, was shortlisted for the prestigious Booker prize.

But it was not a given that Dangarembga would end up in this position, and at one point, it seemed she would not be able to publish her first book at all. In her recent essay collection Black and Female, Dangarembga connects the personal and the political in her recount of how she has been forced into a constant uphill battle to be heard, as a Black person and as a woman.

At the House of Literature, Dangarembga will meet Ethiopian Maaza Mengiste in conversation. Mengiste is the author of several critically acclaimed novels portraying the history of Ethiopia, and she has named Dangarembga as one of her literary inspirations.

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This could be the description of Elena Ferrante’s Naples Quartet, but in fact it describes the trilogy of Tsitsi Dangarembga, began several decades earlier.

In this trilogy, we follow the young girl Tambudzai from her childhood in colonised Rhodesia, through adolescence during the liberation war to the young woman attempting to carve out a life for herself in an independent, but disillusioned, Zimbabwe.

How are these novels read today? And why is it that many of the most central authors from the African continent are still unfamiliar to many European readers?

Dangarembga has made her mark as a writer for more than 30 years. In 2021, she was the eighth writer to be included in the art project The Future Library in Oslo, and this Spring, she was awarded the Freedom of Expression Prize from the Norwegian Writers Union. Her novels have become modern classics, and a number of writers have been inspired by her nuanced portraits of a young girl, by how she renders girls’ and women’s fight for equal rights and how she tells the recent story of Zimbabwe through her fiction.

One of the writers inspired by Dangarembga’s fiction, is Ethiopian Maaza Mengiste. She has also employed the novel to tell the story of a country in her books Beneath the Lion’s Gaze and The Shadow King.

Marjam Idriss is the author of the novel Jannikeevangeliet («The Gospel of Jannike»), a literary critic and a translator of names such as Audre Lorde and Amanda Gorman. This Spring, she has delved into Dangarembga’s body of work.

Tonje Vold is a professor at the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Oslo. She wrote her thesis about Tsitsi Dangarembga, and her research has focused especially on postcolonial literature and literature from Southern Africa.

Moderating the conversation is writer and former artistic director at the House of Literature, Andreas Liebe Delsett.

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In Lucy, a young woman travels from a Caribbean island to an American metropolis to work as an au pair for a wealthy family. Her new home offers culture shocks in the form of the new climate and city life, but also in the form of visible class differences and racism. Trapped in hierarchy and gender norms, Lucy feels isolated and alone, and must figure out how yet to grow as a person and live a meaningful life.

Speaking with Kincaid is journalist and feminist bookshop founder Ida Pallin Bostadløkken. She has devoured Kincaid’s works with eagerness and joy, and March 15, 2023, the two met on our stage for a conversation about Lucy, identity and belonging.

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The Trofymchuks live in a small city in Donbas’ “Red Zone”, Ukraine, which since Russia’s invasion in 2014 has seen frequent shellings and the breakdown of infratructure. They plan to make a film showing their new daily life, and at the dinner table discuss how best to capture the destruction, uncertainty and despair that the war has brought. Just as important is the question of how to show the joys, resilience and community in their neighbourhood and in the family, even in the most dire of circumstances. What is the power of art in a world filled with horrors and absurdities?

In the documentary The Earth is Blue as an Orange (2020), filmmaker Iryna Tsilyk follows the Trofymchuks through one year of living on the frontline of the war, documenting their wish to tell the story of their city. This way, she also portrays the many thousands of families in Ukraine trying to keep hold of the brighter spots in an otherwise dark time.

Iryna Tsilyk is a Ukrainian critically acclaimed filmmaker, author, poet and translator. In over 15 years she has been writing and producing films about the effects of war on civilians, among other things, especially on women and families. The Earth is Blue as an Orange has won a host of awards for its direction and cinematography, which manages to bring the viewer close to the heart of this extraordinarily resilient family.

In conversation with Tsilyk is author Åsne Seierstad. She has written an array of documentary books that show the effects of war and conflict, by getting close to affected individuals, most recently in the critically acclaimed The Afghans. She meets Tsilyk for a conversation on family, Ukraine and the role of art in wartime.

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In her memoir Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, Ypi depicts an unusual childhood: Before she came of age, she had lived trough a communist regime and its fall, the neoliberal society that succeeded it, as well as a ghastly civil war. With acute awareness, attention to detail and no small amount of wit, Ypi offers her reader a unique insight into Albania’s recent history and contention between ideologies and political and economic interests.

With her childhood in Albania, Lea Ypi is today a professor of political theory at London School of Economics, where she, among other things, teaches Marxism. Her memoir Free was awarded the Ondaatje prize and named one of the best books of 2022 by both The New Yorker and Fincancial Times.

At the House of Literature, Ypi will be joined in conversation by Marianne Marthinsen. Marthinsen is a writer of both fiction and non-fiction. Her background is from Norway’s Worker’s Youth League and the Labour Party, which she represented in parliament between 2005 and 2021. Today, she works for Finance Norway.

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If something is to change in the world that is constantly overlooking women, we have to first be aware that this is happening, says writer Caroline Criado Perez. In her book Invisible Women, she lets the numbers speak for her: Data and statistics from all areas of society and a number of countries all show the same picture. “When we see it, we see it. But someone has to point it out to us,” Linn Stalsberg writes in an essay about invisible women in Agenda Magasin. And Criado Perez points it out to us. Where do we go from here? What would change in design and politics if the world started including the experiences of women?

Criado Perez is a critically acclaimed writer, journalist, and activist from the UK, where she has campaigned for women to be featured on British banknotes, and for statues of suffragettes to be erected.

Linn Stalsberg is a journalist and writer of titles such as Det er nok nå (“Enough now”) and Etter pandemien (“After the pandemic”).

This evening, Criado Perez will give an introduction to her project to reveal the male norm governing our everyday lives, before joining Stalsberg in conversation.

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We are in early 80s LA, and the main character, Bret Ellis, is 17 and a senior at the prestigious private school Buckley. A charming new student in class challenges Bret’s attempt to hide his attraction to men.

But something darks lurks beneath the glossy surface. The story is told by a now middle aged Bret revisiting the fatal senior year when a serial killer appeared in LA. Leafing through his old yearbook, he notices the five classmates that are missing.

Ellis likes to provoke, both in fiction and in public debate. The Shards is no exception. First published in serial format on Ellis’s own podcast, the story is passed off as a memoir based on Ellis’s own experiences, much like the earlier Lunar Park. As the serial killer moves ever closer to Bret’s circle, the book also describes Bret’s sexual and literary awakening, making it as much a story of the author’s journey into writing.

When Ellis visits the House of Literature for the first time, he is joined on stage by Emma Clare Gabrielsen. She has worked for many years as a journalist in Natt & Dag, DN and Norwegian broadcasting NRK, where her documentary on pedophiles earned her nominations for both Norway's premier journalist prize and Prix Europe's "European Journalist of the Year".

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In her novel The Shadow King, Maaza Mengiste takes as her starting point a central chapter in the history of Ethiopia , as well as her own family history. She invites us into the realities of the servant Hirut and her madame, but also that of the army leader Kidane, the Italian soldier Ettore and the emperor Haile Selassie. The result is a polyphonic novel that broadens our perceptions of the Ethiopian-Italian war and the lives of human beings in this great history.

Mengiste was born in Ethiopia, but her family left the country in the late 70s, during the Ethiopian revolution, which is central in her debut novel Beneath the Lion’s Gaze. Both her debut and The Shadow King has received great critical acclaim, and been translated into numerous languages.

Sofi Oksanen has, like Mengiste, created fiction from historical events, such as a Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe during the second world war in her novels Purge and Stalin’s Cows. Here, too, the experiences of women are central to the stories.

Now, both Ethiopia and Ukraine are at war again. Sofi Oksanen will join Maaza Mengiste for a conversation about the role of literature in helping us understand history and the times we live in.

The House of Literature’s project to promote African literature is supported by NORAD.

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• Makena Onjerica
• Oduor Okwiri
• Dennis Mugaa
• Idza Luhumyo
• Troy Onyango
• Remy Ngamije
• Gloria Mwanige
• Kwame Nyongo
• Aleya Kassam

In this podcastseries the House of Literature in Oslo, Norway invites writers and thinkers to talk about their work, what they read and present their readinglist from the African continent and diaspora. 

Interviewer in this episode Nosizwe Lise Baqwa

Editing and production by the House of Literature

Music by Ibou Cissokho 

The House of Literature’s project to promote African literature is supported by NORAD.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

• Allah is Not Obliged by Ahmadou Kourouma, translation by Frank Wynne, Heinemann. (2006) (originally in French 2000)
• Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote by Ahmadou Kourouma, translation by Frank Wynne,  Heinemann (2003)(originally in French 1998)
• Home to Harlem by Claude Mckay (1928)
• Banjo by Claude Mckay (1929)
• Romance in Marseille by Claude Mckay(2020)(1933)
• Amiable with Big Teeth by Claude Mckay (2017) (1941)

In this podcastseries the House of Literature in Oslo, Norway invites writers and thinkers to talk about their work, what they read and present their readinglist from the African continent and diaspora. 

Host in this episode Åshild Lappegård Lahn

Editing and production by the House of Literature

Music by Ibou Cissokho

The House of Literature’s project to promote African literature is supported by NORAD.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Galgut’s story glides through the decades of South Africa’s recent history, weaving in and out between the various family members, often changing the perspective mid-sentence from one to another, or to the mildly sarcastic narrator. It is a story about a family’s decline, and about how life largely continues unchanged for the white minority in South-Africa.

Damon Galgut is the author of a number of award winning novels and plays, including The Good Doctor, Arctic Summer and In a Strange Room.

At the House of Literature, he was joined by political scientist and artist Nosizwe Lise Baqwa for a conversation about broken promises and a white, South-African family in decline.

The House of Literature’s project to promote African literature is supported by NORAD

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Shire, born to Somali parents in Kenya and raised in Great Britain, has said that she draws on her own experiences as an immigrant, as well as those of her family and friends in what she writes. Shire has published two chap books, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth and Her Blue Body as well as one full-length poetry collection, Bless the Daughter Raised By a Voice In Her Head. Her poetry explores themes such as girlhood, mothers and daughters, black identity, migration, family and faith in a striking language, interspersed with both references to pop culture and phrases in Somali.

Athena Farrokhzad is a Swedish poet and writer, best known for her debut collection Vitsvit (White Blight), about migration, whiteness and violence. At the Hourse of Literature she joined Shire for a conversation about poetry, marginalized people and their experiences.

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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 exploration of where political power has been focused historically and where it lies today.

Édouard Louis has long been an admirer of Oksanen’s works. The two authors are also politically active in their home countries, and now meet for a conversation on speaking (and writing) truth to power. What does it mean to be a political writer?

The conversation will be moderated by Ane Farsethås, critic, author, and cultural editor in Morgenbladet.

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Didier Eribon is a French philosopher, author and historian, and has written many highly acclaimed works on class, homosexuality, psychoanalysis and Michel Foucault, among other subjects.

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In this personal lecture, Mengiste will talk about her relationship to Louis’s novel and give us her own reflections on the writer’s place in a violent world.

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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 took along the way to reinvent himself.

In writing the book, Louis was deeply inspired by Alan Hollinghurst’s award winning novel The Line of Beauty. Both books follows a gay protagonist trying to fit in within a different class than the one they were born into.

Alan Hollinghurst is the author novels such as The Line of Beauty, The Stranger’s Child and The Sparsholt Affair.

In this personal lecture, he shares his reading of Change: Method and reflections on shared themes such as class, culture and sexuality.

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Few writers have championed the working class like Édouard Louis. In each of his five novels, he portrays the struggles and aspirations of an often undermined and ignored group, exemplified by a family member or himself. His literature concerns itself with the psychological obstacles to self-fulfilment and shows how the strongest contempt for the working class is often held by the people within it. Louis was also vocal in supporting the Yellow Vests movement in 2018.

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This conversation took place at the House of Literature in Oslo. On stage Bennet was joined by the Norwegian author and poet Amalie Kasin Lerstang.

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How should one fight for freedom of speech and facts in a war of propaganda? What can literature and art contribute in dark times? And when does the situation require the author to resort to other tools and weapons than literature?

Andrey Kurkov is one of Ukraine's most prominent writers, with nearly 30 publications for adults and children under his belt, including the novels Death and the Penguin and Friends of the Dead. He has been translated into more than 30 languages.Kurkov is the leader of PEN Ukraine, and has been strongly committed to the Russian invasion and to Ukraine's independence and freedom of expression. In this lecture, Kurkov addresses the situation for Ukrainian writers and journalists in Ukraine and provides an insight into Ukrainian history.

All ticket proceeds from this talk went to PEN Ukraine.

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Koleka Putuma was born in 1993, and belongs to the generation in South Africa known as «Born Free». She is behind one of the most critically acclaimed poetry collections in years, Collective Amnesia, in which the anger of broken promises is acutely felt. Hear Koleka Putuma and Njabulo Ndebele in conversation with journalist Elise Dybvig. The conversation took place on the 11th of february 2020.

LitHouse is the English language podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo (Litteraturhuset), presenting adapted versions of conversations and lectures from our program.

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LitHouse is the English language podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo (Litteraturhuset), presenting adapted versions of conversations and lectures from our program.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Norway, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 been applauded across genres. She is a visiting Professor at Yale University, she writes fiction, and as a columnist for The New York Times, she has been one of the most distinct voices in the American “Me too”-debate. In her memoir Hunger, she explores the underlying causes of her own overweight: a trauma after being gang raped at twelve.

Gay met author Eline Lund Fjæren, for a conversation about power, feminism and privileges. The conversation took place at the House of Literature on August 21, 2019.

Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 writer, Mary McCarthy. McCarthy is best known for her novel The Group, first published in 1959. The novel’s groundbreaking treatment of gender and sexual liberation received a great deal of attention upon publication. How does Kraus read McCarthy today, and in what ways is she still considered innovative? The lecture was held on June 7th 2019.

Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 working class body in the Yellow vests movement that have dominated international news since last fall.

Geoffroy de Lagasnerie is a French academic and intellectual, whose 2018 publication Judge and punish came after he for several years had followed a number of trials.

Louis and de Lagasnerie met artistic director at the House of Literature, Andreas Liebe Delsett, for a conversation about bodies, violence and power. The conversation took place at the House of Literature on May 27, 2019.

Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Leïla Slimani’s conversation with editor of Vinduet, Maria Horvei, took place on March 27, 2019.

Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 referred to as his “novel trilogy”, being closer in form to novels than texts written for theater or film. But are they novels?

The texts move between memoir, fiction and chamber play, while Bergman explores his own childhood through reminiscence of the past and the dramatic of the everyday.

The novel trilogy has been republished in both English and Norwegian. The American professor, critic, memoirist and translator Daniel Mendelsohn has written the introductory essay to the Norwegian edition, in which he reads the trilogy in light of earlier encounters with Bergman’s works. But what does writer and daughter Linn Ullmann think of Bergman’s novel trilogy? The two meet cultural editor of Morgenbladet and writer Ane Farsethås for a conversation about the author Ingmar Bergman. The conversation took place on February 7th 2019.

LitHouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

LitHouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

LitHouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

LitHouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Rules Do Not Apply (translated into Norwegian by Rune R. Moen) is Levy’s memoir, in which the pivot point is those few weeks when the foundation of her life crumbles and she is brought down by the very biological rules she thought herself above. At the house of Literature she met Morgenbladet’s Bernhard Ellefsen for a conversation about biology and lived life. The event took place April 11, 2018.

LitHouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

LitHouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Exploring human relations and art as a way to find truth is central also to Linn Ullman’s writing. Smith og Ullmann met in a conversation at the House of Literature that took place at the 4th of april 2018.

Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For more than thirty years, writer and Nobel Prize Laureate Orhan Pamuk has written world literature with Turkey as his vantage point. His strong interest in myths and stories, society and history runs like a common thread throughout his body of work, which connects Eastern and Western cultural heritage and modernity. He is Turkey’s most-read writer, but he is also contested, and he fearlessly takes on complex questions about politics and society, conflicted identities or the life of the artist. Orhan Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize of Literature in 2006.

Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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/privacy for more information.

Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Why are men still connected to intellect and society, and women to emotions and the body? This is one of the key questions in this conversation, as Hustvedt, Kraus and Neset discuss gender and perception of literature and art, talking about female antiheroes, rage and women’s place and recognition in the art world. In Siri Hustvedt's last essay collection, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women, she examines how narrow ideas of gender and perception affect how we experience art and literature. Art and identity is also a topic in her latest novel, The Blazing World. Chris Kraus, famous writer of the kult novel I love Dick, is the author of a number of genre bending essays and novels dealing with women's experiences in the art world. The conversation took place on August 21st, 2017.

Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Emma Clines acclaimed debut novel The Girls struck a nerve in 2016 when it was published in the US. It has been praised by Richard Ford, Jennifer Egan and Lena Dunham – and embraced by readers and critics world wide. The novel takes us back to California 1969, to a young girl’s quite ordinary and dull life in a small place, and describes in a beautiful language how her life suddenly develops into something totally different, after she meets the girls. Inspired by the Charles Manson murders, Clines novel asks what forces can make regular teen girls into brutal murderers. Cline circles in on this question from the perspective of the girls themselves. Writer and editor Mattis Øybø has also written about a charismatic sect, and the road into the extreme in his highly praised novel Ingen er alene/Nobody is alone.

Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

LitHouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

LitHouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

LitHouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Selahattin Demirtaş is the chairman of Turkey's pro Kurdish coalition party HDP, and considered by many to be the key to the Kurds' future in Turkey.

LitHouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, Litteraturhuset. Music by Apothek.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

LitHouse is the English language podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo (Litteraturhuset). Music by Apothek.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.