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.

At the Frankfurt Book Fair, NORLA’s translator award was today awarded for the 14th time. And it was handed out by the Norwegian Minister of Culture, Trine Skei Grande.
Read the minister’s speech:

The translator of the month for October is Klaus Anders, who is German. He both writes and translates poetry, and Klaus’ first translation was the poems of Olav H. Hauge.
Next week, Norway is Guest of Honour at the Frankfurter Buchmesse, where Hauge and his beloved poem “It Is That Dream” occupy a central place: The motto of the guest of honour project is “The Dream We Carry”, which, in German, has become “Der Traum in uns”.
Now we invite you to get a bit better acquainted with both the translator and Hauge.

Every day, we live stream from the main stage of the Norwegian Guest of Honour Pavilion at Frankfurter Buchmesse.
Watch it here
You will also find our day by day stream here

An overview of the program can be found here

Also, you may enjoy highlights from our Instagram stories from the fair here and here