In connection with Norway being Guest of Honour at the Frankfurter Buchmesse in 2019, NORLA and Grafill collaborated on a touring exhibition with Norwegian book illustrations. As a finale, the exhibition is now coming to Norway, and Grafill’s premises in Oslo and will be on display January 9 – February 2.
The exhibition "Georg Grosz meets Mulysses on Slush Mountain. Modern illustration from Norway” includes work by eleven Norwegian illustrators, selected from a variety of new Norwegian picture books for both children and adults, all of which can be found in books that are translated and available in German.

During 2019, the exhibition has been shown in a number of cities in Germany and Switzerland: Berlin (2 times), Bremen, Leipzig, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Zofingen and Wohlen.

A great year for Norwegian literature exports is now behind us. Norway has been the Guest of Honour at the world’s most important book fair and this huge endeavour, which NORLA has worked on for more than six years, has been a success; never has a Guest of Honour drawn so much media attention in the German-speaking countries and sales figures are record high. The literary program at the book fair engaged the public and the cultural program attracted attention all over Germany.
You can find out more about these figures here.

We are happy to share some key figures from Norway as a Guest of Honour at this year’s Frankfurter Buchmesse. NORLA’s Guest of Honour project report will be presented in the first quarter of 2020:

As the Frankfurt project is coming to an end, project manager Halldór Guðmundsson will be leaving NORLA ahead of Christmas, and be moving back to Iceland.
Also for some of our other project colleagues, their temporary appointments have come to an end; Sunniva Adam, Ellen Trautmann Olerud, Marit Ingvill Sande, Hege Langrusten and Anna Schüller. Andrine Pollen is back in her former position as senior adviser at NORLA.

We would like to thank you for the most wonderful and enriching collaboration – and wish you all the best in the future!

The book fair in Guadalajara, Mexico, has recently taken place so we would like to present a Mexican translator of the month. Juan Gutiérrez-Maupomé lives in Norway and has translated both Ruth Lillegraven and Edvard Munch. And Ibsen and Fosse for the stage. He also has a fondness for Tarjei Vesaas and for poetry. Juan previously worked as a journalist; and also as a writer and producer for film and television in Mexico and the United Kingdom. He has also worked as a consultant for a number of different museum exhibitions in Mexico.

In January, we were very excited to start Norway’s Guest of Honour year ahead of the Frankfurter Buchmesse by offering a brand new series: Poems of the Week, all through 2019!
The poems are available both in English and German translations – as well as in Norwegian – at our Guest of Honour website norway2019.com.

This autumn, NORLA launched a new grants scheme that will help strengthen export, demand, and market development for Norwegian books and authors abroad. The grant scheme aims to stimulate good market ideas and initiatives towards titles with specific export potential, as well as initiating new and strengthening existing collaborative projects with international partners.

Four export and market initiatives have been selected this time round:

The winners are:

For a full year – Norway’s Guest of Honour year at the Frankfurter Buchmesse – we have had the pleasure of introducing German translators of Norwegian literature, through a translator’s relay at our Norway2019.com website.

We now invite you to read one, more or all interviews in this interesting series:
In English
or in German

Today, NORLA had the pleasure of welcoming four new translators to Oslo for the eleventh season of our translators hotel at Hotell Bondeheimen.
The four translators are:

Juste Nepaité (Lithuania)
Michiel Vanhee (Belgium)
Carmen Freixanet (Spain, translates into Castillano and Catalan)
Aleksandr Panov (Russia)

We look forward to spending the next two weeks in their company!

Sales record in the bookstore at the fair, full house in Norway’s pavilion, huge international media attention and growth in the number of visitors at the fair*. The number of private visitors increased by 9.2 per cent from last year, not least thanks to Norway’s program as Guest of Honour – “a crowd-puller” according to the Director of Frankfurter Buchmesse Juergen Boos.

What an amazing book fair week we’ve had!
All of us at NORLA would like to thank everyone who contributed; authors, illustrators, translators, artists, moderators, volunteers, interpreters, agents, publishers, booksellers, our architects and designers, sponsors, everyone we collaborated with both for the literary program and the cultural program, our PR agency, the Norwegian embassy in Berlin, friends and acquaintances, old and new – and last, but not least the great audiences!

THANK YOU all for making the Frankfurter Buchmesse full of memories for life.