Our dear colleague Andrine Pollen celebrates 25 years as an employee of NORLA this month. Hurray!

Cheltenham Literature Festival is the world’s first literature Festival, leading the way in celebrating the written and spoken word, presenting the best new voices alongside literary greats and high-profile speakers.
As part of this this year’s festival program, you can meet eight authors and one illustrator from Norway, as well as translator of Norwegian, Rosie Hedger. NORLA will also be present.

Our Translator of the Month for August is Nora Strikauskaitė, who translates fiction and non-fiction from Norwegian into her native Lithuanian. This year will see the release of the Lithuanian translation of Roy Jacobsen’s novel Just a Mother; it will be the fourth book in the Ingrid Barrøy series to have been translated by Nora. For poetry festivals in Lithuania Nora has translated the works of a number of Norwegian poets, including Triztan Vindtorn, Inger Elisabeth Hansen, Torgeir Schjerven, Liv Lundberg, Knut Ødegård, and Steinar Opstad. She has also translated Norwegian picture books for children (as part of The University of Stavanger’s SPrELL project), and has been involved in Vilnius University’s Norwegian-Lithuanian Dictionary project.
Nora has worked as a Norwegian teacher for many years, and currently teaches full time at Vilnius University.

This year’s Norwegian Festival of Literature in Lillehammer, the largest literature festival in the Nordic region, saw the much anticipated physical opening of the newly established rights center, Lillehammer Rights.

June is the international Pride month and it is normally celebrated all over Norway. At NORLA, we condemn the recent tragic events related to the celebration of Pride in Oslo. At the same time, the event emphasize the importance of introducing gay themes, also to young reader. Therefore, we take part in Pride by sharing a selection of gay themed books available for children and young adults.

We are pleased to present a new Bookstore Buddy; Nic Bottomley of Mr. B’s Emporium of reading delights. He was part of a wonderful group of booksellers who joined us for The Norwegian Festival of Literature at Lillehammer.

The Book Fair in Warsaw was held on May 26 – 29, 2022, with Norway as the Guest of Honour. The venue was Plac Defilad and the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw.
According to estimates, the Fair was visited by approximately 90,000 people, a new record.

Our translator of the month for June and July is Joanna Bernat from Poland. She has an education in Scandinavian studies and Polish philology. For the past thirteen years she has worked for the publishing house Vigmostad & Bjørke and collaborated with translation agencies. She primarily translates literature for children and young adults, but also has experience with non-fiction. In 2018, Joanna started publishing books for children and young adults in Poland under the publishing house named dziwny pomysł (weird idea).

Norway is the Guest of Honour at the Book Fair in Warsaw, 26 –29 May 2022 and today the program was launched during the fair’s press conference in Warsaw.

The Book Fair is a good opportunity to present the breadth of Norwegian literature for the Polish book market. Here, 30 authors from Norway will meet their Polish readers.
Poland has become an important market for Norwegian literature and there is great interest in everything from crime and Nordic noir to children’s literature and comics. Polish literature also resonates in Norway. The guest country project emphasizes the common interest between our cultures and languages.

In 2021, NORLA received grant applications for the translation of Norwegian literature into an incredible 50 different languages, and it’s very exciting that three of these are languages we’ve never worked with before. For the first time, NORLA has awarded grants for the translation of Norwegian books into Hausa, Kazakh, and Northern Sámi.

This week, we have finally been able to warmly welcome translators to Oslo for a two-week stay at Hotell Bondeheimen. This is something we have really missed during the pandemic!
With this, the translator hotel’s twelfth season is opened, and the five translators who are in place in Oslo are:

Ursel Allenstein (Germany)
Sylvia Kall (Germany)
Angélique de Kroon (The Netherlands)
Ana Flecha Marco (Spain)
Fuyumi Nakamura (Japan)

We are thrilled to have them here, and look forward to two pleasant and hopefully productive weeks in their company!

Our translator of the month for May is Natalia Ilishchuk, who translates into Ukrainian. With a master’s degree in international relations, Natalia has many interests and does a number of things such as being a member of the Ukrainian-Scandinavian Center – but her greatest passion has always been for literature. Natalia became interested in Norway, Norwegian literature and language during her early years at the university and has participated in several Norwegian study programs in Norwegian language and culture.
Natalia is originally from Lviv, but for the last few years has lived in Kyiv. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February she had to move from Kyiv but decided to remain in her home country. She has spoken to us via social media about life during the war.