Søk etter “2019”

NORLA is part of ENLIT, a network of European cultural organizations promoting literature and providing subsidies for translation. Margit Walsø was leading the network from 2019 through 2024.

Read more and see all members here

Last week, the international book industry was gathered in Leipzig – and the Norwegian presence was the largest ever! 13 Norwegian authors met their readers at dozens of events, NORLA hosted a translation seminar, and the starting gun was fired for our German bookstore strategy in the build up to Norway as Guest Of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2019.

Below is a selection of photos from some of the many highlights at this year’s book fair in Leipzig. We look forward to more!

Read more (in German) in Börsenblatt.

There’s been quite a lot of activity at NORLA over the last month, with many great meetings both at home and abroad! We would like to share some photos and briefly inform you about the various events that have taken place.

What a wonderful week!

We are looking back on days filled with exciting meetings and events at Frankfurter Buchmesse 2018. After Sunday’s Handover Ceremony, Norway officially is Guest of Honour.
See pictures below for highlights of our week and interesting people we met.

Week 37 was the week for Norwegian literary events in New York. On Thursday 14 October, Norwegian authors were introduced to American publishers in the residence of the Norwegian consulate general. There was standing room only when, one by one, Cecilie Enger, Nina Lykke and Vigdis Hjorth took the floor in front of a fantastic view of Manhattan and the East River.

The Frankfurt Book Fair is the world’s largest book fair and this year all the Norwegian participants were gathered at a large joint stand, in a reinforced collaboration between the Norwegian Publishers Association, Norwegian agents, NORLA and Norwegian publishers. The stand was a hub of extensive activity and vibrant energy, and it was of course also decorated with many good, beautiful books in all genres.
All seven of NORLA’s staff members took part in the book fair this year for the very first time! This was also NORLA’s 25th anniversary in Frankfurt, an event that was commemorated by a friendly gesture of appreciation from the book fair in the form of a delicious cake delivered to the stand.

From May 28th – June 3rd, the Nordic region’s largest literary festival took place in Lillehammer. During the festival, NORLA arranged a seminar for translators who work with translating fiction from Norwegian into English, French, Dutch and Polish. NORLA also invited several international publishers and scouts to Oslo and Lillehammer (in cooperation with the Publishers’ Association and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs). Participants came from Great Britain, the United States, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Portugal and Spain.
A group of German journalists and influencers also visited Norway in connection with the festival.

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.

Germany, in other words! Leipziger Buchmesse takes place in an exhibition hall located 20 minutes from the city centre by S-Bahn but can nonetheless boast of attracting 285,000 visitors to a city with a mere 500,000 residents. How do they achieve this?

Translators are absolutely key to spreading Norwegian literature around the world. Their work is of vital importance and to showcase this work in 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.​​

In 2020 our series of interviews became a translator relay, where each translator passes the baton and a question on to a colleague. We are thrilled to continue our interviews with translators of Norwegian literature into a myriad of languages.​​

March’s Translator of the Month is the Norwegian-Scot Kari Dickson. She has been put forward by – and has received a question from – her translator colleague Anne Bruce. Kari translates fiction, crime, children and youth literature, drama and non-fiction. And her translations receive international attention:
The children’s book Brown (original title: Brune), by Håkon Øvreås and Øyvind Torseter, recently won the American Library Association’s Mildred L. Batchelder Award 2020. And in addition, her translation of the picture book Vanishing Colours is listed on USBBY’s list of Oustanding International Books 2020. The book is written by Constance Ørbeck-Nilssen and illustrated by Akin Duzakin.
Congratulations from us!

June and July’s translator of the month is Rosie Hedger, who translates from Norwegian into English. Rosie Hedger was born in Scotland and completed her MA (Hons) in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Edinburgh, as part of which she spent a year at the University of Oslo taking courses in Norwegian literature and researching for her dissertation on contemporary Norwegian fiction. Since completing her studies, Rosie has lived in Sweden and Denmark, and she is now based in the north of England. Her translation of Gine Cornelia Pedersen’s Zero was shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize in 2019, and her translation of Agnes Ravatn’s The Bird Tribunal won an English PEN Translates Award in 2016. Her translations of Marie Aubert’s Grown Ups and Helga Flatland’s One Last Time are both due out this summer.

Women in Translation, or WIT, is a global collaborative project to help remedy the discrepancy between the amount of works by women published in English translation, and how they are critically received. WITMonth is held held every August, to help promote women writers from around the world who write in languages other than English. Here at NORLA we would like to share our own contribution to WITMonth with you.

September is World Kid Lit Month, an initiative focusing on disseminating literature for young readers written in languages other than English, and books that are available in English translation.

In Norway, we are very proud of our brave literature for children and young adults, and many titles are available in English translation. And we are of course happy to present a small selection.

Below we are offering a selection of links to websites both with samples of and about Norwegian literature in different languages.
Links to websites in Norwegian may be found here.

If you have any tips on other useful pages, we would very much appreciate hearing from you.