Lithouse Podcast

Sara Ahmed is a renowned scholar within fields such as feminist theory, queer theory and critical race theory. In her most recent project, Ahmed has interviewed staff and students about their experiences of making complaints about unequal working conditions or abuses of power such as harassment and bullying. The project has returned her to core questions about the role of emotions not only in how we consent to, but also how we challenge, authority. At the House of Literature, Ahmed gave a lecture on her project, and met sociologist and writer Hannah Helseth in conversation. The event took place on May 22, 2019.   Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

There is a longstanding literary tradition of portraying the city of Istanbul in writing, both by Turkish and other writers. Where does Turkish writer Burhan Sönmez place himself within this tradition? In his novel Istanbul, Istanbul, four political prisoners are held captive below the city. Afraid to expose each other under torture, they refrain from telling each other personal details. Instead, they tell each other number of anecdotes, riddles and stories from world literature and from the great city above their heads. The book is both an innovative prison novel and a portrait of a world city. The conversation between Sönmez and critic Janneken Øverland took place at the House of Literature April 4, 2019, during the International Saladin Days.   Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The American writer Kristen Roupenian caused a sensation when her debut short story «Cat Person» was published in The New Yorker in 2017. With #Metoo at its peak, the story’s treatment of bad sex made it The New Yorker’s most-read online fiction text of all time. Roupenian’s debut collection contains horror elements and a fine-meshed humor emerging when humans and power relations are exposed in a light that is far from flattering. Hear Roupenian in conversation with her Norwegian colleague Eline Lund Fjæren. The conversation took place at the House of Literature April 3, 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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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

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

How are the Syrian refugees working today to understand and to process what happened before and during the war? What are their thoughts on the current situation? In her book We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled, Wendy Pearlman has gathered testimonies from some of the many hundred exiled Syrians she has interviewed, after they were forced to flee during the first years of the war. Wendy Pearlman is the arabist and Palestine scholar who could not help but be moved by the lives and stories of the many hundreds of thousands of refugees who fled to neighbouring Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, and later also Denmark, Sweden and the US. In this podcast, you can hear her in conversation with artistic director at the House of Literature, Andreas Liebe Delsett.The conversation took place on October 10th 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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy

In German Jenny Erpenbeck’s most recent novel, The End of Days, her main character dies a total of five times; first as a baby, then as a young girl in a Europe between two world wars, then as a revolutionary fallen from grace in one of Stalin’s Siberian camps, then as a celebrated East-German writer and lastly as a 91 year old in a nursing home in a reunited Berlin. Erpenbeck is considered one of Germany’s leading contemporary writers. In an original, sharp and truly characteristic voice, Erpenbeck puts Europe’s recent history into writing. The Jewish pogroms prior to world war two, the choices and fates of individuals in the face of our century’s revolutionary powers, and how the aftermath of these choices plays out in contemporary Germany. Erpenbeck was first translated into Norwegian in 2017 with the novel Go, Went, Gone, which was recently longlisted for the International Man Booker Prize. The novel tells the story of a retired Classics professor who takes an interest in a group of hunger striking Africa

Guatemalan writer Eduardo Halfon is a central voice in the new wave of literature from Central America and the Caribbean. The episodic and absurd novel The Polish Boxer moves between the university campus in Guatemala City to the Balkan of gypsys via the Nazis’ concentration camps. The traveler is a university teacher searching for a pianist who might be a gypsy. But he is also searching for his own family history: At the center of the story is his grandfather, with a number tattooed on his forearm. Not his own phone number, which he always struggled to remember, as the university teacher was told as a child, but his prison number from a concentration camp. Once, his grandfather’s life was saved by a Polish boxer. Hear Eduardo Halfon in conversation with writer and editor Mattis Øybø. The conversation took place on september 14th 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 A

Valeria Luiselli, translated into more than twenty languages, is a central name in Mexican contemporary literature. Her debut novel, Faces in the crowd, has made critics compare Luiselli to writers such as Ali Smith and Zadie Smith. It has now been published in Norwegian, translated by Ingrid Mefald Hafredal. In Faces in the crowd, several temporal levels and several story strands are weaved together. In Mexico City, a writer and mother of two is writing about the time she lived in New York. The time she was obsessed with the Mexican poet Gilberto Owen, who lived and worked in 1920s New York, on the fringes of the Modernist movement the Harlem Renaissance. What connections are there between the obscure poet and the writer’s own lives? Listen to Valeria Luiselli in conversation with Maria Horvei, editor of the literary magazine Vinduet. The event took place August 28, 2018.   Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring internat

In her essay Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions, the Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli explores the fates of Latin American child migrants in and on their way to the US. Luiselli herself lives in the US, and in an acute refugee situation, she volunteered as an interpreter and gained first hand knowledge about the violence and discrimination that the refugees experience. Photographer, writer and performance artist Teju Cole was born in Nigeria, but has lived in New York and the US for much of his life. On several occasions, he has pointed out parallels in the waves of Latin American immigrants entering the US, and the fates of the refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea. In her novels, British-Somali writer Nadifa Mohamed has investigated Somali experiences of marginalization and violent structures within the British Empire. Mohamed will moderate this evening’s conversation, that will focus on Trump’s US, but also on the open wounds of history: the legacy of slavery and colonization, as well as

A. S. Byatt was named one of Britain’s fifty greatest writers by The Times in 2008. Her literary breakthrough, Possession: A Romance, was awarded the prestigious Booker Prize. Byatt visited the House of Literature in connection with the 2011 Norwegian publication of her novel The Children's Book, which is set in Southern England in the late 19th century. In conversation with Duke University professor Toril Moi, Byatt discusses her writing strategies, her extensive research processes and growing interest for history. The conversation took place June 8. 2011.   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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Daniel Mendelsohn is a Classics professor, and teaches his students the classic epic The Odyssey. One Spring, his 81 year old father decides to take his class. But what kind of a hero was Oddyseus, really? the father asks critically - a liar who cheated on his wife! This is the starting point for Daniel Mendelsohn’s memoir An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic. In this podcast, Mendelsohn talks with literary critic in Morgenbladet, Bernhard Ellefsen, about following in the footsteps of the classics. The conversation took place on October 25. 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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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

The Sellout is about an America so steeped in its racist history that race becomes unavoidable. But nobody wants to talk about it, and there is no end of human oblivion, foolishness and evil. The Guardian has dubbed Beatty the funniest writer in America. However, the novel is also characterized by an immensely precise language and deadly seriousness. At the House of Literature, Beatty met writer, poet and editor Dan Andersen for a conversation. The event took place April 18, 2018, and opened with a video introduction from comedian Thomas Seltzer, one of Beatty’s greatest Norwegian fans.   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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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

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

Colson Whiteheads novel The Underground Railroad was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. It soon became a #1 New York Times Bestseller, it got picked by Oprah Winfrey for her book club, and the US President Obama chose it for his summer reading list. The book mixes the historical novel with allegory and sci-fi, as Whitehead tells the story of Cora, a 15-year-old slave who escapes from a plantation in Georgia. This haunting and inventive narrative gives an alternative history of the American slavery. This conversation between Whitehead and editor of the Norwegian Book magazine of Klassekampen, Karin Haugen, took place on August 24th, 2017. Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode, you can hear a conversation between Martin Puchner and Helge Jordheim about literature’s role in shaping the world. What came first – the world as we know it, or the stories about the world? Puchner is one of the world’s foremost literary critics and scholars, and professor at the University of Harvard. Jordheim is professor of cultural history at the University of Oslo. The conversation took place February 14, 2018. Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode, you can hear a conversation between the American writer Jennifer Egan and the Norwegian writer and psychologist Finn Skårderud, about Egan’s novel Manhattan Beach. The conversation took place on February 9th, 2018.   Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode, you can hear a conversation between the English writer Rachel Cusk and the Norwegian author Linn Ullmann, talking about the first books of Cusk’s fiction trilogy Outline and Transit. The conversation took place on January 24th, 2018.   Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.