LitHouse podcast
91 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 2 months ago - ★★★★★ - 3 ratingsLitHouse is the English language podcast from the House of Literature (Litteraturhuset) in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Episodes
Ibrahim Olabi about sexual violence in Syria
June 14, 2019 07:00 - 41 minutes - 57 MBSeveral women who have survived brutal imprisonment and sexual violence in Syria are part of lawsuit initiatives against the current government. How may these initiatives contribute to hold the government responsible for their crimes, and to better the situation for Syrian women? Ibrahim Olabi is director of the Syrian Legal Development Program, and works with human rights issues connected to the Syrian conflict, such as sexualized violence against women. Olabi delivered the 2019 Saladin Lec...
Édouard Louis and Geoffroy de Lagasnerie about bodies, violence and power
June 07, 2019 07:00 - 1 hour - 100 MBHow can we understand the movement Gilets Jaunes – the Yellow vests? What does this police violence against blacks say about the official French view of black people? Édouard Louis’s latest novel, Qui a tué mon père, or Who Killed My Father, has recently been published in Norwegian and English translations. Here, Louis writes about his father’s broken body. He recognizes the same broken, French working class body in the Yellow vests movement that have dominated international news since las...
Sara Ahmed on complaint and abuses of power
May 31, 2019 07:00 - 1 hour - 115 MBSara Ahmed is a renowned scholar within fields such as feminist theory, queer theory and critical race theory. In her most recent project, Ahmed has interviewed staff and students about their experiences of making complaints about unequal working conditions or abuses of power such as harassment and bullying. The project has returned her to core questions about the role of emotions not only in how we consent to, but also how we challenge, authority. At the House of Literature, Ahmed gave a le...
Istanbul seen from below: Burhan Sönmez and Janneken Øverland
May 16, 2019 07:52 - 1 hour - 86.4 MBThere is a longstanding literary tradition of portraying the city of Istanbul in writing, both by Turkish and other writers. Where does Turkish writer Burhan Sönmez place himself within this tradition? In his novel Istanbul, Istanbul, four political prisoners are held captive below the city. Afraid to expose each other under torture, they refrain from telling each other personal details. Instead, they tell each other number of anecdotes, riddles and stories from world literature and from the...
Kristen Roupenian and Eline Lund Fjæren on Cats and Women
May 03, 2019 07:00 - 1 hour - 89.3 MBThe American writer Kristen Roupenian caused a sensation when her debut short story «Cat Person» was published in The New Yorker in 2017. With #Metoo at its peak, the story’s treatment of bad sex made it The New Yorker’s most-read online fiction text of all time. Roupenian’s debut collection contains horror elements and a fine-meshed humor emerging when humans and power relations are exposed in a light that is far from flattering. Hear Roupenian in conversation with her Norwegian colleague E...
Leïla Slimani and Maria Horvei about Lullaby
April 05, 2019 07:00 - 1 hour - 84.5 MBIn French Moroccan Leïla Slimani’s books, the psychological development of the characters is what captures the reader. Lullaby explores the interactions of a small upper middle-class family. What power struggles take place within the walls of this Parisian apartment? What secrets are buried in the nanny’s past? And how do the children end up dead? Leïla Slimani’s conversation with editor of Vinduet, Maria Horvei, took place on March 27, 2019. Lithouse is a podcast from the House of L...
Ingmar Bergman the author
February 22, 2019 08:00 - 45 minutes - 63.2 MBThis year marks 101 years since the birth of one of the world’s most influential artists: Ingmar Bergman. The anniversary last year brought renewed focus to his films, but what about his writing? During his life, Bergman wrote more than 150 plays, film manuscripts, essays, articles and works of fiction. The Best Intentions (1991), Sunday’s Children (1992) and Private Confessions (1996) are often referred to as his “novel trilogy”, being closer in form to novels than texts written for theat...
Voices from Syria: Wendy Pearlman and Andreas Delsett about the revolution and the war
October 19, 2018 07:00 - 1 hour - 87.9 MBHow are the Syrian refugees working today to understand and to process what happened before and during the war? What are their thoughts on the current situation? In her book We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled, Wendy Pearlman has gathered testimonies from some of the many hundred exiled Syrians she has interviewed, after they were forced to flee during the first years of the war. Wendy Pearlman is the arabist and Palestine scholar who could not help but be moved by the lives and stories of t...
Jenny Erpenbeck and Kaja Schjerven Mollerin on The end of days
October 12, 2018 07:00 - 1 hour - 90.5 MBIn German Jenny Erpenbeck’s most recent novel, The End of Days, her main character dies a total of five times; first as a baby, then as a young girl in a Europe between two world wars, then as a revolutionary fallen from grace in one of Stalin’s Siberian camps, then as a celebrated East-German writer and lastly as a 91 year old in a nursing home in a reunited Berlin. Erpenbeck is considered one of Germany’s leading contemporary writers. In an original, sharp and truly characteristic voice, E...
Eduardo Halfon and Mattis Øybø in conversation
September 28, 2018 07:00 - 55 minutes - 75.9 MBGuatemalan writer Eduardo Halfon is a central voice in the new wave of literature from Central America and the Caribbean. The episodic and absurd novel The Polish Boxer moves between the university campus in Guatemala City to the Balkan of gypsys via the Nazis’ concentration camps. The traveler is a university teacher searching for a pianist who might be a gypsy. But he is also searching for his own family history: At the center of the story is his grandfather, with a number tattooed on his ...
Valeria Luiselli and Maria Horvei about Faces in the crowd
September 21, 2018 07:00 - 1 hour - 83.5 MBValeria Luiselli, translated into more than twenty languages, is a central name in Mexican contemporary literature. Her debut novel, Faces in the crowd, has made critics compare Luiselli to writers such as Ali Smith and Zadie Smith. It has now been published in Norwegian, translated by Ingrid Mefald Hafredal. In Faces in the crowd, several temporal levels and several story strands are weaved together. In Mexico City, a writer and mother of two is writing about the time she lived in New York....
Valeria Luiselli, Teju Cole and Nadifa Mohamed
September 14, 2018 07:00 - 1 hour - 86 MBIn her essay Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions, the Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli explores the fates of Latin American child migrants in and on their way to the US. Luiselli herself lives in the US, and in an acute refugee situation, she volunteered as an interpreter and gained first hand knowledge about the violence and discrimination that the refugees experience. Photographer, writer and performance artist Teju Cole was born in Nigeria, but has lived in New York and the US fo...
A.S. Byatt and Toril Moi about The Children’s Book
June 22, 2018 07:00 - 59 minutes - 81.7 MBA. S. Byatt was named one of Britain’s fifty greatest writers by The Times in 2008. Her literary breakthrough, Possession: A Romance, was awarded the prestigious Booker Prize. Byatt visited the House of Literature in connection with the 2011 Norwegian publication of her novel The Children's Book, which is set in Southern England in the late 19th century. In conversation with Duke University professor Toril Moi, Byatt discusses her writing strategies, her extensive research processes and grow...
A.S. Byatt and Toril Moi about The Children’s Book
June 22, 2018 07:00 - 59 minutes - 81.7 MBA. S. Byatt was named one of Britain’s fifty greatest writers by The Times in 2008. Her literary breakthrough, Possession: A Romance, was awarded the prestigious Booker Prize. Byatt visited the House of Literature in connection with the 2011 Norwegian publication of her novel The Children's Book, which is set in Southern England in the late 19th century. In conversation with Duke University professor Toril Moi, Byatt discusses her writing strategies, her extensive research processes and grow...
Daniel Mendelsohn and Bernhard Ellefsen about An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic
June 01, 2018 07:00 - 56 minutes - 78.1 MBDaniel Mendelsohn is a Classics professor, and teaches his students the classic epic The Odyssey. One Spring, his 81 year old father decides to take his class. But what kind of a hero was Oddyseus, really? the father asks critically - a liar who cheated on his wife! This is the starting point for Daniel Mendelsohn’s memoir An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic. In this podcast, Mendelsohn talks with literary critic in Morgenbladet, Bernhard Ellefsen, about following in the footsteps of th...
Ariel Levy and Bernhard Ellefsen on The Rules Do Not Apply
May 11, 2018 07:00 - 57 minutes - 78.8 MBAriel Levy is a successful journalist in The New Yorker, where she often writes about women who break with the traditional expectations in how you express and live gender and sexuality. She has a nice little house and is married to the woman in her life. When she, at 37, also becomes pregnant, her life is perfect. Or not. The Rules Do Not Apply (translated into Norwegian by Rune R. Moen) is Levy’s memoir, in which the pivot point is those few weeks when the foundation of her life crumbles ...
Paul Beatty and Dan Andersen on The Sellout
May 04, 2018 07:00 - 52 minutes - 72.5 MBThe Sellout is about an America so steeped in its racist history that race becomes unavoidable. But nobody wants to talk about it, and there is no end of human oblivion, foolishness and evil. The Guardian has dubbed Beatty the funniest writer in America. However, the novel is also characterized by an immensely precise language and deadly seriousness. At the House of Literature, Beatty met writer, poet and editor Dan Andersen for a conversation. The event took place April 18, 2018, and opened...
Ali Smith and Linn Ullmann about Autumn
April 27, 2018 07:00 - 57 minutes - 78.8 MBAutumn (translated into Norwegian by Merete Alfsen) is the first in Scottish Ali Smith’s season quartet. Winter has already come out in English. In both books, hope, warmth, sensuality and humanity is articulated as a contrast to political lies and cowardice. Art is portrayed as a path to a truer, more beautiful and sharper understanding of the world. Exploring human relations and art as a way to find truth is central also to Linn Ullman’s writing. Smith og Ullmann met in a conversation at...
Peter Frankopan on the Crusades as seen from Asia
March 16, 2018 07:00 - 1 hour - 89.7 MBIn this episode, you can hear a lecture by Oxford historian and author of The Silk Roads, Peter Frankopan, about the history of the Crusades, as seen from Asia. The lecture was delivered as part of the 2018 International Saladin Days, on March 6th, 2018. Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Colson Whitehead and Karin Haugen on The Underground Railroad
March 09, 2018 08:00 - 49 minutes - 68.1 MBColson Whiteheads novel The Underground Railroad was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. It soon became a #1 New York Times Bestseller, it got picked by Oprah Winfrey for her book club, and the US President Obama chose it for his summer reading list. The book mixes the historical novel with allegory and sci-fi, as Whitehead tells the story of Cora, a 15-year-old slave who escapes from a plantation in Georgia. This haunting and inventive narrative gives an alternative...
Martin Puchner and Helge Jordheim about the literature shaping the world
March 02, 2018 08:00 - 1 hour - 92.2 MBIn this episode, you can hear a conversation between Martin Puchner and Helge Jordheim about literature’s role in shaping the world. What came first – the world as we know it, or the stories about the world? Puchner is one of the world’s foremost literary critics and scholars, and professor at the University of Harvard. Jordheim is professor of cultural history at the University of Oslo. The conversation took place February 14, 2018. Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in O...
Jennifer Egan and Finn Skårderud about Manhattan Beach
February 16, 2018 08:00 - 1 hour - 85.8 MBIn this episode, you can hear a conversation between the American writer Jennifer Egan and the Norwegian writer and psychologist Finn Skårderud, about Egan’s novel Manhattan Beach. The conversation took place on February 9th, 2018. Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Rachel Cusk and Linn Ullmann about Outline and Transit
February 02, 2018 08:00 - 1 hour - 86 MBIn this episode, you can hear a conversation between the English writer Rachel Cusk and the Norwegian author Linn Ullmann, talking about the first books of Cusk’s fiction trilogy Outline and Transit. The conversation took place on January 24th, 2018. Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more informa...
Chimamanda Adichie and Ane Farsethås about feminist tools
December 21, 2017 14:00 - 1 hour - 88.9 MBNigerian Chimamanda Adichie has long made her mark as a distinct political voice. Both in her novels and her small non-fiction books We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, Adichie addresses issues of power, violence, independence and the role of literature in understanding and expanding one’s view of the world. Hear her in conversation with cultural editor of Morgenbladet, Ane Farsethås. The conversation took place at the House of Litera...
Arundhati Roy about her political and literary project
December 21, 2017 14:00 - 1 hour - 84.5 MBTwenty years after her success novel The God of Small Things, India’s Arundhati Roy is back with a new novel: The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. But in between the two, Roy has been busy: through a number of essay books, she has dealt with issues such as pollution, human rights abuses, industrialization and social inequality, she has lived with the maoist guerilla in the jungle and visited the militarized zone in Kashmir. In this lecture, she outlines her literary and political work through t...
The Political Body
December 21, 2017 14:00 - 55 minutes - 75.8 MBÉdouard Louis, Athena Farrokhzad and Kristina Leganger Iversen has all written literature challenging and expanding the way we think about identity, language and the body. Together with composer and pop artist Sandra Kolstad, they have created the performance The political body. Commissioned for the House of Literature’s ten year anniversary, it was first performed at the House of Literature October 6, 2017. Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted...
Aslı Erdoğan and Mustafa Can on today’s Turkey
November 24, 2017 08:00 - 1 hour - 89.1 MBTurkish writer Aslı Erdoğan published several novels, narratives and short stories before she became a more prominent political newspaper writer. In 2016 she was arrested and imprisoned for her attachment to the pro-Kurdish newspaper Özgür Gündem (Free Agenda). She recently got her passport back and was finally able to travel to Oslo to take part in a stage conversation. At The House of Literature, she meets the Swedish-Kurdish writer Mustafa Can in a conversation about her new essay collect...
Paul Auster and Janneken Øverland
October 06, 2017 07:00 - 54 minutes - 75.4 MBIn this episode, you can hear a conversation between the American writer Paul Auster and the Norwegian critic and former editor, Janneken Øverland. The conversation took place on August 22nd, 2017. Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Arundhati Roy and Aslak Sira Myhre
October 06, 2017 07:00 - 1 hour - 97.5 MBIn this episode, you can hear a conversation between the Indian writer Arundhati Roy and director of the National Library og Norway Aslak Sira Myhre. They met on stage shortly after Arundhati Roys new novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness came out in Norwegian translation. The conversation took place on September 19th 2017. Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers....
Orhan Pamuk and Helge Jordheim
October 06, 2017 07:00 - 1 hour - 99.3 MBIn this episode, you can hear a conversation between the Turkish writer and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, and professor of Cultural History at the University of Oslo, Helge Jordheim. Pamuk visited Oslo spring 2017, when his most recent book The Red-Haired Woman was out in Norwegian translation by Ingeborg Fossestøl. The conversation took place on May 24th, 2017. For more than thirty years, writer and Nobel Prize Laureate Orhan Pamuk has written world literature with Turkey as his vantage poi...
Chris Kraus and Ane Farsethås
October 06, 2017 07:00 - 46 minutes - 63.9 MBIn this episode, you can hear a conversation between the American writer Chris Kraus and Culture Editor of Morgenbladet, Ane Farsethås. The conversation took place on August 20th, 2017. LitHouse is a podcast from the House og Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Jonathan Safran Foer and Bjørn Gabrielsen
September 08, 2017 07:00 - 52 minutes - 72.4 MBIn this episode, you can hear a conversation between the American writer Jonathan Safran Foer and the Norwegian writer and journalist Bjørn Gabrielsen, that took place on August 16th, 2017. Everything solid and fixed falls apart in Jonathan Safran Foer’s third novel Here I Am. The Jewish American couple Jacob and Julia find that both their relationship and the rituals that they have built their family life around, gradually lose their meaning. When the unimaginable happens, and Israel suffer...
Siri Hustvedt and Chris Kraus
September 01, 2017 11:29 - 56 minutes - 77.1 MBIn this episode, you can hear a conversation between the American writers Siri Hustvedt and Chris Kraus, led by Anne-Hilde Neset, director of Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo. Why are men still connected to intellect and society, and women to emotions and the body? This is one of the key questions in this conversation, as Hustvedt, Kraus and Neset discuss gender and perception of literature and art, talking about female antiheroes, rage and women’s place and recognition in the art world. In Siri H...
Emma Cline and Mattis Øybø
May 12, 2017 07:00 - 49 minutes - 68.5 MBIn this episode, you can hear the American writer Emma Cline talking with the Norwegian writer and editor Mattis Øybø. The conversation took place on April 26th, 2017. Emma Clines acclaimed debut novel The Girls struck a nerve in 2016 when it was published in the US. It has been praised by Richard Ford, Jennifer Egan and Lena Dunham – and embraced by readers and critics world wide. The novel takes us back to California 1969, to a young girl’s quite ordinary and dull life in a small pla...
After the Gaza war
April 07, 2017 06:00 - 1 hour - 92.9 MBIn this episode, Nazmi Al-Jubeh, historian and archeologist at Birzeit Univeristy, and Hind Khoury, former Minister for Jerusalem Affairs for the Palestinian Authorities, talk about the current situation in Jerusalem, following the 2014 Gaza war, reflecting openly on the situation for Palestinians in Jerusalem under occupation, and the shortcomings of the Palestinian Authorities. Leading the conversation is senior researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, Marte Heian-Engdal. The Palest...
Simon S. Montefiore and Erika Fatland
March 24, 2017 07:00 - 1 hour - 84.2 MBIn this episode, writer and historian Simon Sebag Montefiore talks about his book The Romanovs: 1613-1918, which tells the often brutal, bloody and erotic story of the Tsar dynasty which ruled Russia for 300 years. Leading the conversation is Erika Fatland, herself an acclaimed author of several non-fiction books from Russian-controlled areas, among these Englebyen, Historier fra Beslan (The City of Angels. Stories from Beslan) and Sovjetistan. The conversation took place at the House of Lite...
Jenny Offill and Bernhard Ellefsen
February 11, 2017 08:43 - 1 hour - 86.2 MBIn this episode, the American writer Jenny Offill talks with the Norwegian literary critic Bernhard Ellefsen, in a conversation that took place on August 17th 2016. Introduction by the Norwegian writer Gunnhild Øyehaug. LitHouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Hisham Matar and Helge Jordheim
December 02, 2016 07:00 - 1 hour - 100 MBIn this episode, the Libyan writer Hisham Matar talks with Helge Jordheim, Professor of Cultural History at the University of Oslo. The conversation took place on august 24th 2016. Introduction by Sigurd Falkenberg Mikkelsen, Middle East correspondent for The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. LitHouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Music by Apothek. Hosted on ...
César Aira and Kristina Solum
November 25, 2016 07:13 - 1 hour - 92 MBIn this episode, the Argentinian writer César Aira talks with his Norwegian translator Kristina Solum, in a conversation that took place on September 14th 2016. Introduction by Gisle Selnes, professor of Literature at the University of Bergen. LitHouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Selahattin Demirtaş giving the Saladin Lecture 2016
November 09, 2016 17:07 - 1 hour - 175 MBIn this episode you can hear Selahattin Demirtaş giving that Saladin Lecture 2016. The lecture was given on April 13th, as part of the International Saladin Days, and was held in Turkish. It was followed by a few questions that were put to mr. Demirtaş in English, and answered in Turkish. Selahattin Demirtaş is the chairman of Turkey's pro Kurdish coalition party HDP, and considered by many to be the key to the Kurds' future in Turkey. LitHouse is a podcast from the House of Literatu...
Édouard Louis on Toni Morrison
October 27, 2016 08:20 - 47 minutes - 64.8 MBIn this episode the French writer Édouard Louis talks about Toni Morrison, in a lecture that was given at the House of Literature in Oslo on september 23rd 2016. LitHouse is the English language podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo (Litteraturhuset). Music by Apothek. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.