Helena Fagertun – Translator of the Month
Our translator of the month for May is Helena Fagertun, who translates from English, Norwegian and Danish into Swedish. The influential Swedish literary blogger Bernur has described her as a ‘translator who has developed a speciality for a certain kind of unruly queer prose’. Helena has translated books by contemporary authors such as Kate Zambreno, Julia Otsuka and Isabel Waidner, and introduced classics by writers like Mary MacLane and Ann Quin to Swedish readers. In 2026, her first translation of novels from Norwegian are being published: The Sami Problem by Kathrine Nedrejord and Eat All by Leander Djønne.
In 2020 Helena published her own chapbook, Forever ljung, on the barely-there Norwegian micropress AFV Press. She has taught both creative writing and translation, and was for a time the editor of Provins, a literary magazine for writing from northern Sweden, which in 2016 was named Swedish Arts Magazine of the Year. She also works as a freelance editor and has edited many books including the award-winning Osebol by Marit Kapla and Helena Hansson’s Swedish translation of Norwegian author Tina Åmodt’s novel The Other Mother. She is currently on the jury of Årets översättning, which every year awards a prize to the best published translation into Swedish, and provides a stipend for an emerging translator.
Do you do any other work in addition to translation?
Yes, I do, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. That’s partly due to a feeling of restlessness, and partly because there are so many aspects of literature I find it fun to be involved in and I think, or I’d like to think, that these different kinds of work feed into each other.
I tend to say I spend half my time on translation, a quarter on editing (mostly Swedish literature, sometimes translated literature), and a quarter on other things, like writing essays, chairing talks and being on various juries and evaluation panels. At the moment I’m on the jury for Årets översättning as well as taking part in a really fun project called Brunnlockspoesi where each year we commission a different poet to write a poem that is then cast into new drain covers in cities around Sweden.
Your German colleague, Clara Sondermann, passed the Translator of the Month baton to you with the following question:
You organised the event series Rum för översättning at Gothenburg Book Fair for several years. What is it that excites you about working with translators and with translation as an artform?
I was the project manager of Rum för översättning from 2020 to 2023. Every year a number of talks and panel discussions are held in the space during the Gothenburg Book Fair. We also started doing a few events at Littfest in Umeå. I’m very interested in the stuff around the actual process of translation, everything from the economics to the process of editing and of finding readers.
Translators have a huge wealth of knowledge and I don’t mean only in a linguistic sense but also literary knowledge in a wider sense, and subject knowledge in specific areas. I wish translators got invited to take part in panel discussions about subjects other than translation more often. Let translators of thrillers talk about thrillers, translators of literary prose about the relationship between fiction and reality, or why not a whole crowd of translators talking about everything that has to do with language, literature and the authors and books they translate.
When I passed on the Rum för översättning baton, I thought I was done arranging translation events, but recently I’ve been itching to do it again, and I’ve started working on a new project, still secret for the time being, with a few others. . .
What’s your best advice to someone who’d like to become a translator?
The advice I always give is to be interested in others, and this really applies to anyone who has anything to do with literature. Read a lot, and not only in the language you translate from but especially in the language you translate into – both original work and translations from many different languages. Go to other people’s events. You don’t have to love networking, but literature is created in a context and it’s arrogant to believe that someone else would be interested in you and what you do and know if you are not interested in what other people are up to.
Read more
More about Helena on Books from Norway.
Those of you who understand Norwegian can read her interview in full here
More interviews in NORLA’s series
Translators are our most important stakeholders when it comes to the spread of Norwegian literature in the world. Their work is of crucial significance, and in order to shed light on this, we embarked on this series of interviews, known as ‘Translator of the Month’.
You can find all of the interviews here
