Next year, Norway will be Guest of Honour at the Frankfurter Buchmesse. Bringing forth new literary voices internationally is an important goal of the initiative. NORLA has entered into the development program, New Voices, in collaboration with Talent Norway and the Norwegian Publishers’ Association.
Group 5 of New Voices consists of the following authors:
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.
2019 is Norway’s year as Guest of Honour at Frankfurter Buchmesse, and the first event in this Guest of Honour year will be the touring exhibition "Georg Grosz meets Mulysses on Slush Mountain. Modern illustration from Norway.” The exhibition will open at Felleshuset, at the Norwegian Embassy in Berlin, on January 23rd.
Norwegian literature abroad is growing. In 2018, NORLA granted support for the translation of 639 books by Norwegian authors, into 45 languages. Making 2018 the best year there has ever been for Norwegian literature in translation.
– Never, in NORLA’s 40-year history, have so many titles been granted translation support, says Margit Walsø, NORLA’s director.
We look forward to all the meetings and experiences ahead!
There are many highlights ahead, both in Norway and abroad, in our Guest of Honour year at the Frankfurter Buchmesse.
Below we have listed some of the activites that will take place in the months to come.
Leipziger Buchmesse is an important venue for encounters between writers and their readers – and a unique arena for cosplay. In connection to Siri Pettersen’s Raven Rings trilogy we organised a cosplay competition in Norway. Now the winner has been selected.
Spring as Guest of Honour has been rich, hectic and fun! Some of the highlights being the book fair in Leipzig featuring 18 authors and 40 events; Berlinale, where Norway was the partner country at the European Film Market (EFM); jazzahead! in Bremen which included 117 musicians from Norway; the German-Norwegian literature festival in Oslo with the German press; and The Norwegian Festival of Literature in Lillehammer with German booksellers and journalists, international publishers and translators.
On the eve of the London International Book Fair, the New Voices took part in a publisher’s seminar at Free Word Centre in London.
Marianne Kaurin, Jan Kristoffer Dale, Tore Skeie and Bår Stenvik presented themselves and their authorship to an interested audience of British publishers. (See the presentations by clicking on their names).
The seminar was organized by NORLA in collaboration with The Norwegian Embassy in London.
With more than 70 program posts we hope to engage and entertain the German and international audience at the main stage in Norway’s Guest of Honour Pavilion from 16 to 20 October 2019.
The Leipzig Book Fair, attended by 200,000 visitors, is the largest literary arena in Germany after the Frankfurt Book Fair. Our presence there from 21-24 March was one of the highlights of Norway’s literature program for spring 2019.
In addition to being Guest of Honour at Frankfurter Buchmesse, Norway was also the focus country at the European Film Market (EFM) at the Berlinalen in February; and in April Norway was the partner-country at the world’s largest jazz trade-fair jazzahead! in Bremen.
Norway is Guest of Honour at the Frankfurter Buchmesse 2019. We look immensely forward to let participants from all over the world experience the best of literature and culture from Norway! The Norwegian Guest of Honour project is Norway’s largest cultural export project ever.
The Guest of Honour project comprises hundreds of activities in the German speaking area throughout 2019, and culminates at the book fair in October 2019.
See the complete programme day by day here
*Download the program taking place in the Guest of Honour Pavilion at Frankfurter Buchmesse, both for the Main stage and Stage 2, as PDF here
*Search in the Frankfurter Buchmesse event calendar eller søk i Bokmessens arrangementkalender her
*Receive our daily book fair news by registering at Norway2019.com
(far right at the very bottom of the page)
At our website Norway2019.com you will find more information about the project, events and news.
Norway’s status as Guest of Honor country at the Frankfurt Book Fair this year has led to a record interest in literature from and about Norway in German-speaking countries. From September 2018 to December 2019, German-language publishers will have released 400 titles from and about Norway. The translators are making a formidable effort.
The government’s proposed 2020 budget mentions NORLA and the Norwegian Guest of Honour project at Frankfurter Buchmesse: “The project has led to record-high demand for Norwegian literature abroad. Based on this, and as part of the government’s focus on profiling and exporting Norwegian art and culture abroad, an increase of four million kroner to NORLA’s regular subsidy is proposed.”
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:
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:
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.
February’s Translator of the Month is Anne Bruce from Scotland. She has been put forward by – and has received a question from – her Mexican translator colleague Juan Gutiérrez-Maupomé. Now the translators featured in NORLA’s series are passing the baton from one to the other.
Anne translates fiction and has admirable experience with crime novels. In 2019 her translation of Jørn Lier Horst’s The Katharine Code was awarded the coveted British prize The Petrona Award for best translated Scandinavian crime novel published in 2019.
Learn more about Anne and the books she has translated here.
Those of you who understand Norwegian can read her Translator of the Month interview here.
February 1 is the application deadline for translators of Norwegian literature regarding stays at NORLA’s Translators hotel spring 2019 (weeks 19-20, i.e. as of Monday May 6th through Sunday May 19th).
Please note that the offer is only available for translators who translate directly from Norwegian.
The application deadline is 1 March.
Read more here (in Norwegian only).