A Reading & Conversation with Norwegian Writer Hanne Ørstavik (11/02/22)
The Center for the Study of Europe at Boston University and AGNI present:
A Reading & Conversation with Norwegian Writer Hanne Ørstavik • Moderated by Carolynn Mireault (Creative Writing ’22)
Wednesday, November 2, 2022
5 – 6:30 PM
Pardee School of Global Studies | 121 Bay State Road, Boston, MA
This event celebrates the release of Ørstavik’s novel, Ti Amo, in English translation from Archipelago Books,
What can be found within a gaze? What lies inside a painting or behind a handful of repeated words? These are the questions that haunt our unnamed narrator as she tends to her husband, stricken with cancer, in the final months of his life. She examines the elements of their life together: their Vietnamese rose-colored folding table where they eat their meals, each of the New Year’s Eves they’ve shared, their friendships, and their most intimate exchanges. With everything in flux, she searches for the facets that will remain. Hanne Ørstavik writes, “I have a compulsion for truth that feels like my very life force itself.” Tentative, laced with a tingling frankness, Ørstavik’s prose adheres so closely to the inner workings of its narrator’s mind as to nearly undo itself. In Martin Aitken’s translation, Ørstavik’s piercing story sings.
Hanne Ørstavik published the novel Cut in 1994 and embarked on a career that would make her one of the most remarkable and admired authors in Norwegian contemporary literature. Her literary breakthrough came three years later with the publication of Love (Kjærlighet), which in 2006 was voted the 6th best Norwegian book of the last 25 years in a prestigious contest in Dagbladet. Since then, the author has written several acclaimed and much discussed novels and received a host of literary prizes.
Carolynn Mireault is a fiction writer from Waterbury Center, Vermont. She is a recipient of the 2022 St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award in Literature and the 2022 Florence Engel Randall Fiction Award. She holds an MFA from Boston University (2022), where she served as a Leslie Epstein Fellow and the Senior Teaching Fellow.
