“I knew that I was a writer, but I had to stop writing like other writers. I had to write like myself.”

Elizabeth Strout published her first novel at the age of 43, after years of writing, rewriting, and searching for a voice of her own. Today, she is among the most read contemporary writers in American letters, known for her empathetic, profound portraits of people and small-town worlds that stay with the reader and won’t let go. Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton are characters embraced by readers and critics across the world. This year saw the publication of Strout’s new novel, The Things We Never Say, about yet another everyday hero: the middle-aged history teacher Artie Dam.

“Every single word matters,” Strout said when she last visited the House of Literature. How does she find the right words, in the voice that is so unmistakably her own? What writers have shaped her along the way, and where does she look for inspiration?

Returning to the House of Literature for an evening about her writing life, Strout will talk about how she creates her memorable characters, the importance of observation, and how she works to bring out the extraordinary in ordinary people’s lives.

On stage, Strout was joined by writer and literary scholar Kristina Leganger Iversen for a conversation about reading, writing and literary courage.

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Ever since her debut in 1998, American Elizabeth Strout’s literary characters have charmed readers and critics across the world. The headstrong, unpredictable Olive Kitteridge gave Strout the Pulitzer Prize, and was adapted into an award-winning TV series, and the novels about the writer Lucy Barton, who grew up in poor and dysfunctional surroundings on the Illinois countryside, have been embraced by readers. All her books are translated into Norwegian by Hilde Rød-Larsen.

In Strout’s new novel, The Things We Never Say, we meet Artie Dam – a middle-aged and respected history teacher in Massachusetts, a very ordinary man. He is the kind of person that keeps the community together, always with a kind word to the students who need it the most. But Artie feels a growing sense of loneliness and alienation, and a secret revealed makes him question even those closest to him, and what he really knows about the people in his life.

This is a novel about our ability to speak truthfully to each other, and about the things we never talk about. The story is set in 2024, when Donald Trump is reelected, and Strout shows how the country’s growing polarization is lodged into the local communities, into people’s bodies, marriages, families, friendships, and into conversations in which so many things no longer can be said.

It is in the quiet, everyday life that the big dramas play out in Strout’s universe. With warmth, precision and depth, she portrays the inner landscapes of ordinary people’s lives, always with a keen eye for how class conflicts and political unrest seep in and take root in them.

Strout ass joined by writer Marie Aubert for a conversation at Det Norske Teatret’s main stage, about the big dramas in everyday life, about truth, solidarity, and the things we never say.

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For Cal, it is a defeat to be forced to leave the big city of Edinburgh for his childhood home in the tiny island Isle of Harris. Not only has he failed to get a job despite his expensive education, even worse is having to leave the freedom of the city, where he could live out his attraction to men, something that is unthinkable at home, a place where everybody knows everybody, and his father is leading the psalms in the strict, puritan congregation.

In Scottish Douglas Stuart’s new novel John of John, we meet a father and a son, and a windswept and depopulated island community. Here, the men are in charge, of the sheep farming, of the congregation and of keeping the traditional tweed weaving alive. Cal doesn’t fit into the tight mold, but is toon becomes clear that his father too, has his own secrets, about why his wife left him when Call was little, and about the real owner of their farm. Stuart’s story illuminates the islanders’ community and bigotry, their vast elbow room and their confinement.

In just a few years, Douglas Stuart has established himself as one of our time’s leading chroniclers of poverty, marginalization, and queer experience. His debut novel Shuggie Bain won the prestigious Booker Prize, and his second book Young Mungo was also embraced by critics and readers alike.

At the House of Literature, Stuart was joined by writer and Professor of literature Janne Stigen Drangsholt for a conversation about love and loneliness, shame and small-town moral guardians.

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In conversation with Tove Gravdal about Roosevelt’s right hand, history’s middlemen and the role of diplomacy today.

From Epstein files to the US and Israel’s bombing of Iran: The events of the last few months have highlighted the importance – and shortcomings – of international cooperation and diplomacy.

Norway’s foreign secretary, Espen Barth Eide, is one of many who suddenly have to navigate uncharted waters. Through his many years in the service of Norwegian foreign policy, he has worked to increase dialogue and alliances between countries and people. Now, it seems someone has tossed the rule book, making small states like Norway all the more vulnerable in the face of brazen superpowers.

Our current situation was far from the mind of internationally acclaimed Dutch historian Geert Mak when he set out to write about the role of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s now all but forgotten right hand. But in the process, the many parallels between the time he wrote about – the prelude to the second world war, the Spanish civil war and the rise of fascism – and our own times became increasingly apparent.

In The Switchman, Mak show how the social worker Harry Hopkins, who became Roosevelt’s right hand, laid the foundation for the modern welfare state and forged a crucial alliance between the US and Europe in a time when fascism was on the rise. What can Hopkins’s story tell us about the value of middlemen, mediators and diplomats – in a time when the transatlantic alliance is threatened both from the outside and within, and when many of us have lost faith in the world of diplomacy?

With titles such as The Lives of Jan Six and In Europe. Travels through the Twentieth Century, Mak has established himself as a central chronicler of modern European and American history. Barth Eide spent time as a researcher in the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, and in central positions within the UN and the World Economic Forum besides his many years in Norwegian politics.

In June 2026, Barth Eide joined Mak for a conversation about Hopkins and the role of diplomacy today, moderated by writer and journalist Tove Gravdal.

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The Wergeland Lecture 2026

Andrey Kurkov is one of Ukraine’s most central cultural and literary ambassadors. With titles such as Death and the Penguin and Grey Bees, he has gained readers across the world. But when Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, he was no longer able to write fiction. Instead, he has travelled widely to talk about the reality and brutality of the war, writing essays and a journal from his daily life in the war. Already in 2022, he published Diary Of An Invasion.

Growing up during the Soviet era, Kurkov discovered writers such as George Orwell and Aleksandr Solzjenitsyn through illegal copies. He has experienced first hand what a society without freedom of speech really entails, as well as the role of language and culture in establishing a national identity. Kurkov himself writes in Russian, Ukrainian and English. Part of what Putin is out do destroy is Ukraina as an independent nation, with a culture and a language of its own.

In what ways is Putin appropriating history and culture in his narrative about the invasion? And how has the war – ironically – fortified both Ukraine’s and the rest of the world’s view of Ukrainian language and culture?

The Wergeland lecture is an annual event. Each year, The House of Literature will invite an international voice who embodies Henrik Wergeland’s spirit in their work and writings.

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Oksana Zabuzhko is one of the central writers of Ukraine’s post-Soviet generation. In 1996, she caused great controversy with her debut novel, Field Work in Ukrainian Sex, in which she challenged the current view won women’s role in society and in the relationship, where she was expected to be subordinate to the man.

The novel has become a work of reference for Eastern European feminism, and with its exploration of female experience, language and power, it has been compared to writers such as Jamaica Kincaid and Angela Carter.

The novel portrays the destructive relationship between the writer Oksana and the sculptor Mykola, as well as the many challenges Oksana faces as a young female, Ukrainian poet. In an immediate and colloquial language, partly addressed to the reader, partly the narrator’s own stream of conciousness, Zabuzhko navigates what it means to be Ukrainian and what it means to be a woman, at a moment in time when both identities were being negotiated.

Zabuzhko has published a number of award winning novels, essay collections and books of poetry, including The Museum of Abandoned Secrets and The Longest Journey. She has a PhD in philosophy, and she has taught Ukrainian literature at Harvard and the University of Pittsburgh.

Author and historian Lotta Elstad has also explored history and female experience in novels such as Jeg nekter å tenke [«I refuse to think»] and the critically acclaimed Xiania series. She joined Zabuzhko for a conversation about sex, love and the view of women in Ukraine.

The conversation was held in English.

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Few historians can match the position of British Anthony Beevor. With his 13 historical book son recent European history, he has become one of the most respected and read writers of history. Especially his books about the Second World War, including Stalingrad and The Second World War have become modern classics.

In his latest book, Beevor delves into the final days of one of history’s largest empire, the Russian Romanov dynasty. Rasputin and the Downfall of the Romanovs provides a portrait of the «mad monk» Rasputin, and explores how one man seemingly toppled an entire dynasty. Through detailed portraits of the tsar couple, their advisors and the growing revolutionary hunger of the masses, Beevor shows how a combination of political incompetence, religious fanatism and social unrest brought about the catastrophic fall of the dynasty.

The Norwegian author Erika Fatland has travelled all across the former Russian empire. In award winning books like Sovietistan and The Border – A Journey Around Russia, she shows how history affects the region today. She joined Beevor for a conversation about Rasputin, the Romanovs and the fall of an empire.

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After 43 years together, author Siri Hustvedt loses her husband, the author Paul Auster, to an aggressive form of cancer. Now there is only Siri left, in a time in which memories, smells and words from the time before seep in. Eventually, she starts writing; about Auster's illness and his last days, about their early days together and their all-consuming love, about decades of a shared life filled with joy and laughter, with books and stories, worries and sorrow. Hustvedt's writing eventually becomes the book Ghost Stories: A Memoir.

Ghost Stories is a personal account of the life of a popular and critically acclaimed author-couple, as well as an exploration of how grief and loss affect us, physiologically and mentally, in dialogue with philosophy, literary history and neuroscience. The grief from losing her husband mingles with the grief and anger over what kind of country the United States is becoming, what is lost, and what is worth fighting for.

Siri Hustvedt is among the most central writers and thinkers in the US. She has written a number of critically acclaimed novels and essay collections, including The Summer without Men, The Blazing World, The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves, and A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women.

Writer and journalist Marte Spurkland has also written a personal account of losing her father to cancer, in the critically acclaimed Pappas runer («Dad’s Runes»). She met Hustvedt for a conversation about grief, memory and shared life.

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No, reading novels is not a solution to our political miseries. For that organization, active resistance, and harder rhetoric is required. But we need stories.

Author Siri Hustvedt said these words during a lecture at the House of Literature in 2017, in Donald Trump’s first term as president.

Hustvedt is one of those writers who turns to literature as well as organized resistance faced with a harsh political reality. Together with her late husband, the author Paul Auster, she founded Writers Against Trump (today Writers For Democratic Action), a coalition that organizes town hall meetings, protests and political theatre. Hustvedt writes about the beginning of the movement in her latest book, Ghost Stories: A Memoir.

Faced with Trump’s curbing of rights, and ICE’s conduct in a number of American cities, Hustvedt has been a staunch critic. Raised in Minnesota by Norwegian parents, she soon learned of her mother’s resistance to the Nazi occupation of Norway during the second world war. In a much-shared Facebook post, Hustvedt points to a parallel between the Norwegians’ resistance and today’s protests in the US: «the moral choice between accepting fascism and opposing it is the same,» she writes.

What is the current situation in the US like for someone like Hustvedt, seeing ICE patrol her hometown? How are Americans responding to the continuous dismantling of their democracy and constitutional state? What is the role of the writer in critical times, and how may literature confront the material and interpersonal challenges that we are currently facing?

Siri Hustvedt is among the most central writers and thinkers in the US. She has written a number of critically acclaimed novels and essay collections, including The Summer without Men, The Blazing World, The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves, and A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women.

At the House of Literature, she was joined by writer and journalist Karin Haugen for a conversation about a US unraveling, and about the resistance in art and community.

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In A History of Women in 101 Objects, author Annabelle Hirsch shows us how the things around us aren’t just objects, but testimonies to a common cultural history and set of values. Hirsch shows how something as simple as a hair clip can betray power structures and how kitchen appliances have defined women’s role in society. With a playful tone and a political sharpness, A History of Women is a manifesto for women’s common history that also defies general perceptions of history’s progress and universal improvements.

Annabelle Hirsch is a German-French journalist, author and translator. A History of Women is her first book and has garnered wide recognition since its publication in German in 2022.

Now, she visits the House of Literature for a lecture on reading cultural histories out of the objects that surrounds us, where everyday objects can be symbols of liberation as well as subjection.

After the lecture, there will be a short conversation led by author, women’s rights advocate and Director of the House of Literature, Susanne Kaluza. Kaluza has written two additional chapters for A History’s Norwegian publication and will meet Hirsch on stage for a short conversation.

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