In this, its 12th edition of its literature festival, Louisiana Literature, will be featuring a wide range of renowned international writers from countries such as Japan, Italy, Argentina, Iceland, the United States, Ireland, Nigeria, Austria, the United Kingdom, Tanzania and France. The festival’s programme extends
over four days from 17–20 August.
The guest authors will be appearing on the festival’s stages at the beautiful and unique settings of the museum in Humlebæk and in the Sculpture Park, will be presenting a wide range of genres and modes of expression.
The Guest Authors Include:
Haruki Murakami
Abdulrazak Gurnah
Wole Soyinka
Joyce Carol Oates
Ian McEwan
Ali Smith
Claire Keegan
Hernan Diaz
Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir
Tessa Hadley
Ia Genberg
Claudia Durastanti
Eva Menasse
Constance Debré
Camila Sosa Villada
Karolina Ramqvist
Fríða Ísberg
International Writers at Louisiana Literature 2023
Haruki Murakami (b. 1949) is considered to be the most popular Japanese author of all time. When his latest novel, The City and its Uncertain Walls, was published in his home country, it sold 150,000 copies in the first week. Murakami made his international breakthrough with Norwegian Wood (1987) and has written a long succession of novels that have captivated readers the world over. In his easily accessible language, he mixes the mysterious with the mundane, melancholy with humour, and western and Japanese culture in whimsical and surreal ways.
‘I’m interested in the mystery of personality, how our personalities arise and then how they fade,’ says the great American author Joyce Carol Oates, who first visited the festival in 2014 Oates’s books deal with life’s great dramas: desire, shame, passion, violence and race. The film adaptation of her masterpiece, the novel Blond (2000) about Marilyn Monroe’s life and death, was released on Netflix in 2022. Most recently she has written about sexual assault before #MeToo in the novel Babysitter (2022), which The Guardian called ‘a wild and panoramic piece of work’.
The Tanzanian author Abdulrazak Gurnah (b. 1948) received the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents’. In his books he writes about people exiled from their homes, families, society and themselves. As Gurnah too was forced to flee East Africa at the age of eighteen, the experience of exile has also shaped his own life. His books make a virtue of telling stories about people who do not have a voice of their own. His novels Paradise and Afterlives were published in Danish in 2022. Paradise is a relentless, sensory tale of an East African boy who is sold into debt bondage by his own father, and Afterlives explores the aftereffects of Germany’s colonization of Tanzania.
The Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, who turns 89 in July, is an exceptional personality who has led a life full of dramatic events and whose lifetime’s work has been closely linked to political developments in Nigeria. In 1986 Soyinka was the first black African to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, and as a dramatist, writer and political activist, Soyinka has had an enormous impact on literature in Africa – and continues to do so today. His third-ever novel – his first in almost fifty years – was published in 2021. Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth describes a contemporary Nigeria marked by political and social
corruption. Here the crime genre meets political satire in a modern allegory of power and deceit.
Ian McEwan (b. 1948) is considered one of the UK’s most outstanding authors. He has won the Booker Prize and been nominated for it five times. McEwan’s first visit to the festival was in 2013. Lessons (2022) has been called McEwan’s answer to books such as John Williams’ Stoner and Richard Ford’s Bascombe trilogy, in which an era is reflected through the depiction of a single character. In Lessons, the main character, 14-year-old Roland, is seduced by his 25-year-old piano teacher, but the affair takes a sadistic turn, causing Roland to doubt his memories, intentions and desires for the rest of his life. McEwan charts Roland’s restless life in the light of global political events such as the Chernobyl disaster, the fall of the Berlin Wall, terrorism and the Covid-19 pandemic. ‘A wonderful author has delivered another
mesmerising, memorable novel,’ said the British press.
Scotland’s Ali Smith (b. 1962) has become an international star since visiting the first Louisiana Literature in 2010. Now she’s making a return with the book Companion Piece (2022), which forms a kind of fifth volume to her acclaimed seasonal quartet and will be published in Danish at the beginning of June under the title Andre tider. Smith’s books are experimental and unpredictable. She plays with language and weaves narratives together, but can also be explicitly political at the same time. The Los Angeles Times described Companion Piece as ‘a clever, erudite and humane portrait of our intense contemporary moment. Leaping from mythology to etymology, history to literature, she also makes the granular elements of daily movement the stuff of life-sustaining art.’
In France, Constance Debré (b. 1972) has been causing a sensation since her award-winning novel Play Boy was published in 2018. Her follow-ups have been treated as major literary events and won her the admiration of international figures such as Leila Slimani and Eileen Myles. Debré approaches sexuality, motherhood and freedom from an autofictional angle and with a punk-like directness. Love Me Tender, from 2020 is an unsentimental novel about the author’s own life where the traditional role of mother is abandoned in favour of sexual self-fulfilment.
Since debuting with Accidents in the Home (2002), Tessa Hadley (b. 1956) has written seven critically acclaimed novels and three short-story collections depicting the everyday lives of the British middle class – unfulfilled dreams, infidelity, dinner parties, and deaths in the family. Although she is not that well known here in Denmark, Hadley is often called ‘an author’s author’ and her books are admired by Zadie Smith and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, among others. Hilary Mantel wrote of Hadley’s latest book, Free Love (2022), that it is ‘a beguiling novel, deceptively easy to read; beneath the surface swim disturbing and age-old questions about freedom and fate.’ In the novel Hadley tells the story of a stay-at-home mother who, in 1967, breaks away to pursue her desires in the London of the Swinging Sixties.
Hernan Diaz (b. 1973) was born in Argentina, grew up in Stockholm, and now lives in New York and writes in English. He has just received America’s most distinguished literary award, the Pulitzer Prize, for his second novel, Trust (2022), which he will present at the festival. The novel is a sweeping narrative about class, money and power. With the roaring 1920s and the Great Depression as a backdrop, Diaz writes about the married couple Helen and Benjamin Rask, who belong to New York’s upper echelons – a literary page-turner that has been compared to The Great Gatsby. Before this, Diaz wrote the novel In the Distance
(2017), about a young Swedish immigrant’s journey across the American plains in the nineteenth century.
‘Durastanti casts the universal drama of the family as the sieve through which the self –woman, artist, daughter – is filtered and known,’ writes Ocean Vuong about the Italian-American writer Claudia Durastanti (b. 1984). In the hybrid novel Strangers I Know, which will be published in Danish in August, Durastanti blends fiction, essay and memoir as she examines the mythologies that have shaped her. It is a portrait of her deaf parents and of a childhood marked by silence, frustration and misunderstandings. The novel has been translated into 21 languages, was short-listed for Italy’s Strega Prize, and made it onto The New Yorker’s list of the best books of 2022.
In The Details (2022), the Swedish author Ia Genberg (1967) writes with incisiveness, intelligence and understated humour about a fever-stricken woman looking back on four significant people in her life. From the Stockholm of the 1990s via Copenhagen to Galway in Ireland, we follow the portraits of these people, while in the woman’s feverish state, moments, meetings, coincidences and a thousand details flicker past. The novel earned Genberg the biggest Swedish literary award, the August Prize, in 2022.
The Argentinian author Camila Sosa Villada (b. 1982) was born a boy but began to dress as a woman at the age of 15. Later she spent a period as a sex worker, and it is with brutal realism and poetic surrealism that she draws on these life experiences in the novel Bad Girls (2019). It is a wild, funny and overwhelmingly tragic story about transvestism, discrimination and misogyny. ‘Every so often, a slim book absolutely clobbers you with its exuberance and beauty – for me, this was that book,’ says author Torrey Peters. Édouard Louis has also called it ‘the most important book I’ve read on sexuality since Jean Genet.’
Danish readers got to know the Icelandic writer Fríða Ísberg (b. 1992) when her short-story collection Kløe was published here in 2020. Her debut novel, The Mark, which examines notions of empathy, polarization and prejudice through the eyes of four different characters, will be released this summer. In a near-future time that resembles our own age, a portion of the population seeks to use surveillance and artificial intelligence to make the world a safer place. In the novel, people are given a mark when they pass an empathy test designed to reveal who among them has traits of amorality and anti-social behaviour. And those who fail are offered treatment in the form of medication and therapy. Ísberg’s debut novel is being translated into 17 languages and also marks her international breakthrough.
Ireland’s Claire Keegan (b. 1968) has only published four short books over the last 22 years, but it’s worth the wait every time for her unobtrusive yet intense prose depicting complex, ordinary lives. There are no grand plot-driven dramas here, yet Keegan manages to create moving, universal narratives which have won the enthusiasm of Karl Ove Knausgård and others. Keegan’s latest novel, Small Things Like These (2020), was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. This year the latter novel was successfully adapted into a film by the title The Quiet Girl.
‘With Darkenbloom, Eva Menasse has created a masterpiece,’ wrote Die Zeit about the award-winning Austrian author (b. 1970). With Darkenbloom, Menasse enters into a tradition of darkly satirical novels about Austria’s past ranging from Robert Musil to Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede Jelinek. The novel takes place in a village in the summer of 1989 as the Iron Curtain is about to fall. People there would rather forget the past, but when a skeleton is found in a meadow, the silence begins to fracture. Menasse portrays historical guilt and gives a chilling depiction of the landscape and a number of people from the village – but does so with humour, too.
Since her debut in 1998, Iceland’s Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir (b. 1958) has been translated into more than 25 languages, and speakers of Danish have been able to read Swans Mate for Life (2016), Hotel Silence (2018), Miss Iceland (2019) and Animal Life (2021). Now the author, who was awarded the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2018, is back with the novel Eden. It is a book that poses urgent questions about human responsibility. Author colleague Sjón has called Ólafsdóttir ‘the most brilliant cartographer of the heart. She specializes in those little journeys we make to save ourselves and those we love.’
Karolina Ramqvist (1976) is one of the most notable Swedish authors and feminists of her generation. She has been translated into 15 languages and is admired by many younger Danish writers. A Swedish critic wrote about her latest novel, Bread and Milk (2022): The book ‘has actually changed my outlook on life. This is because of her utterly unique, sensuous language. It takes a great writer to be able to write like this about life crises and yearning, mealtimes and dairy products.’ In Ramqvist’s original, life-affirming story, an adult narrator looks back on her lonely upbringing – and her mealtimes – and tries to find out who she once was and who she later became.
Louisiana Literature also presents a long succession of the year’s best writing from Danish authors. They are all announced in the programme which is available at the website and can be downloaded in a pdf-format here.
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Louisiana Channel features almost 400 author interviews, recorded at the festival, which are freely available here.
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
Gl Strandvej 13, 3050 Humlebæk, Denmark