Meet Jonny Halberg - Selected Title Author

What is the book about?

Like many other writers, I have inner readers I try to speak to. The readers I address in such conversations are tormented people who don’t know why they’re tormented, but who might be able to alleviate some of their anxiety by reading what I write – at least while they’re reading it. If the anxiety gets worse after they’re finished reading, then I hope that it at least contains some of what I experience when I read something that really makes an impression: an enriched anxiety, a language that doesn’t fortify the chaos but that has associations and questions you can make your own. I hope to be able to write stories that speak to the reader from another world, stories that incorporate both our shared reality and the experience you can find only through art’s expression, which, at its best, sticks with you until the day you die.

What inspired you to write this book?

The first thing I remember is a story I heard from a friend from Averøy, an island at the far north of the west coast of Norway. He told me about a closeted older man who would walk alone along the Atlantic Ocean Road on the island. One day, my friend passed by the man and saw that he was crying. This image – this solitary homosexual man trudging alone day in and day out – got my imagination going. This is a story, I thought. Not the one I’ll tell, but a story from an island that had this kind of feeling. The other was that I wrote a short story-like introduction to a novel (The Twin) that was about a doctor’s son who joined his father for a home birth. I wanted to carry on with that story. And I did, in a way, in Revelation to John.

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See all NORLA’s Selected Titles for the spring 2023 here