Norwegian and international publishers, agents, translators and authors gathered at the annual seminar in Lillehammer.

Between 30 May and 4 June, Norway’s biggest literature festival took place in Lillehammer. During the festival, NORLA arranged a seminar for German translators of children’s and YA literature. In collaboration with the Norwegian Publishers Association and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, NORLA also invited 18 international children’s book publishers to Oslo and Lillehammer. This is the first time the annual publishers seminar has been entirely devoted to children’s and YA literature.

A Norwegian sports and cultural delegation led by Norway’s Minister of Culture, Linda Hofstad Helleland, visited China from 25 to 27 May. The delegation also included the author Jostein Gaarder and NORLA’s director, Margit Walsø.
Jostein Gaarder’s books are very well known to Chinese readers as a total of 16 have already been published in Chinese!
A central part of the delegation’s cultural programme was to renew and strengthen cultural collaboration with China.

On 25 May, ZHANG Fusheng, previously editor of Nordic literature at the People’s Literature Publishing House, was awarded the Royal Norwegian Order of Merit by the Minister of Culture, Linda Hofstad Helleland.

Twelve international publishers from Germany, the United Kingdom and USA visited Oslo May 2 – 5.
It was a true pleasure to welcome our guests to Norway, and to show them some of the best literary voices Norway has to offer!

All of four editors of Karl Ove Knausgård’s books were invited to attend the opening of the Munch exhibition «Towards the Forest» («Mot skogen») which is curated by Knausgård.
The guests also visited Norwegian publishing houses and literary institutions. In addition to meeting with Norwegian authors, they also met editors and literary agents for a full three days.

NORLA offers its warmest congratulations to Gunnar Staalesen, the winner of the 2017 Petrona Award for the Best Scandinavian Crime Novel of the Year published in the UK.
Staalesen receives the award for his book Where Roses Never Die, which has been translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett and published by Orenda Books.

We currently have positions available on the project team for Norway as Guest of Honour country at the 2019 Frankfurt Book Fair. We are looking for a head of PR and a project assistant for this unique international cultural initiative.
Applications close on 1 June.

More information in Norwegian available here.

Read all about the Norwegian Guest of Honour-project here.

We are delighted to introduce our translator of the month for May: Tamara Kvizhinadze, who translates into Georgian.
In conjunction with NORLA, she is responsible for a seminar this month for translators and students of Norwegian at Tbilisi University’s Centre for Scandinavian Studies, where she is also employed as a Norwegian teacher. The seminar has been arranged to coincide with the Tbilisi Book Fair, where Norway is the country in focus, and in which the four authors on NORLA’s “New Voices” programme will be participating. (Read more).

Tamara’s latest translations are When the Robbers Came to Cardamom Town by Thorbjørn Egner and The Ballad of a Broken Nose by Arne Svingen. She has translated no fewer than ten books from Norwegian to Georgian, as well as having work published in several different magazines.

Those of you who understand Norwegian can read the interview here.

Today, NORLA had the pleasure of welcoming three (of a total of four) new translators to Oslo for the sixth season of our translators hotel at Hotell Bondeheimen:

Mariia Tkachenko (Russian)
Anja Majnaric (Croatian)
Miluse Jurickova (Czech).
Sotiris Souliotis (Greek) will be joining the group next week.

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

In the end of April, NORLA invited stakeholders to take part in a planning and input conference for Norway as Guest of Honour nation in Frankfurt 2019. We are pleased that 250 participants from the literature trade and cultural life took part in sounding the starting shot for the project – which will be the largest ever Norwegian cultural initiative abroad.

Lots of very exciting things happened at NORLA in 2016, and once again translation support awarded for Norwegian titles hit new records.
Read more.

Now you can read about all our activities in the 2016 annual report, which can be downloaded below.

See also our 2016 album on Facebook.

Our 2016 web calendar has more details of all NORLA’s activities.

Those of us who work at NORLA regularly share our personal reading tips for various seasons.
It will soon be Easter and in conjunction with the Norwegian tradition of reading crime fiction in particular during the Easter holiday, we have selected some good books that can offer a bit of suspense.

If you read Norwegian, you will find the tips here.

The translators are the most important stakeholders we have for bringing Norwegian literature to the world. Their work is of vital importance and to showcase this work in January 2015 we started the interview series «Translator of the Month». Here we become better acquainted with translators from the Norwegian language and their challenging work, which introduces Norwegian literature to all the different languages of the world.

The translator of the month for April is Jarka Vrbova. She has translated a long list of Norwegian books into Czech and in 2009 was conferred with the honour Knight 1st Class by the Royal Norwegian Order of Merit for her contribution to the promotion of Norwegian-Czech alliances, particularly in the fields of literature and culture.
In addition to her work as a translator, she teaches Norwegian at Charles University in Prague and has thereby played a wholly central role in the work of spreading enthusiasm for Norwegian language and literature in the Czech Republic and also in terms of recruiting budding translators. We at NORLA are very thankful for all her work!

This spring Jarka is of current interest with all of three translations: Jostein Gaarder’s Dukkeføreren (The Puppeteer), Henrik Svensen’s nonfiction book Bergtatt (In High Places) and Bjørg Vik’s Små nøkler, store rom (Small Keys, Large Rooms).
Read our interview (in Norwegian) here.