The history of the Vikings is usually told from the top down, through powerful characters such as chiefs, commanders and royalty, with raids, looting and war at the centre of the narrative. But what about all the others? What was it like to live a normal life as farmer, a merchant, wife or child?

This is the central question in a recent book by British Eleanor Barraclough, Embers of the Hands. Taking her starting point from archaeological finds in order to tell the story of ordinary people’s lives in the Viking Age, she reveals how, beneath the surface, we find stories equally dramatic to the great heroic tales of those on the top.

On stage, she will be joined by her Norwegian colleague Tore Skeie. With books such as his award winning The Wolf Age: The Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons, and the battle for the North Sea Empire, Skeie depicts a both vivid and brutal Viking Age rife with decisive events. Skeie’s approach to history is mainly through the upper class, such as through Saint Olaf or the nobleman Alv Erlingsson.

Skeie and Barraclough write the history of the Viking Age from two different perspectives; from the bottom up and from the top down. What can these two ways of reading history learn from each other?

The conversation was moderated by Carline Tromp, writer, critic and old norse philologist.

The event was part of the Festival of Non-Fiction 2025.

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Arinze Ifeakandu is a literary shooting star from Nigeria, with a characteristic, lyrical prose, who has been advocated by authors such as Damon Galgut og Colm Tóibín. God’s Children Are Little Broken Things from 2022 is his literary debut, winning him several literary prizes, including the prestigious Dylan Thomas Prize. In addition to the short story collection, Ifeakandu has published several shorter pieces of both fiction and non-fiction, and is currently working on his first novel.

This is Ifeakandu's reading list:

* Chinua Achebe

* Peter Abrahams, Mine Boy

* Imbolo Mbue, Behold the Dreamers

* NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names

* Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

* Toni Morrison

* James Baldwin

* Maya Angelou

* Gbenga Adesina

* I.S. Jones

* Ebenezer Agu

* Logan February, Painted Blue with Salt Water

* Gbenga Adeoba

* Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo, The Tiny Things Are Heaviest

* Eloghosa Osunde, Vagabonds!

* Chukwuebuka Ibeh, Blessings

* Gbolahan Adeola

* Otosirieze Obi-Young from Open country magazine

The host in this episode is Madeleine Gedde Metz

Editing and production by the House of Literature

Music by Ibou Cissokho

The House of Literature’s project to promote African literature is supported by NORAD.

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«Everything» has become political – what you eat, what you wear, where you work, what you dream of. Political engagement permeates society, and movements like Occupy Wall Street, the Yellow Vests, and Fridays for Future emerge and create headlines, before disappearing just as quickly. Yet this politicization does not lead to real social change, only to disillusionment and frustration.

This is how Belgian historian Anton Jäger defines our times in his book Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences. Jäger describes how we are caught between continuous politicization and political apathy, where the focus has shifted from institutions to short lived movements and social media.

Torbjørn Røe Isaksen is the political editor in the business newspaper E24, and he has read Jäger’s book with great interest. In addition to his long experience as an MP and from various ministerial positions in government for the Norwegian conservative party Høyre, he is the author of several books, including Ingen tror på nåtiden (No one believes in the present) from 2023. He joined Jäger during the Festival of Non-Fiction 2025 for a conversation about our hyperpolitical present, and what to do about it.

The event is part of the Festival of Non-Fiction 2025.

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South African Koleka Putuma is an author, a playwright, an editor, amentor, and she has become a cult figure in the activist poetry community. In a direct style that pulls no punches, she writes about homophobia and transphobia, gender and racism, while each line pulses with compassion and love. Putuma entered the literary world with a bang in 2017, with her debut collection Collective Amnesia, which explores South Africa’s historic racism and its consequences, both institutionally and within the culture. Since then, she has published two more critically acclaimed poetry collections.

This is Putuma's reading list:

* Vuyelwa Maluleke

* Maneo Mohale, Everything Is a Deathly Flower

* Busisiwe Mahlangu, Surviving Loss

* Octavia Butler, The Parable of the Sower

*Arinze Ifeakandu, God’s Children Are Little Broken Things

* D’bi.young

The host in this episode is Åshild Lappegård Lahn

Editing and production by the House of Literature

Music by Ibou Cissokho

The House of Literature’s project to promote African literature is supported by NORAD.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

After the second world war, many of the biggest war criminals from Nazi Germany flee to South America in the hope of avoiding penalty. One of them is the SS officer Walter Rauff, who settles in Chile, and ends up with a central role in the bloody regime of Augusto Pinochet. How are these two men, their stories and destinies, connected?

In his loose trilogy about European history, lawyer Philippe Sands takes us through the major developments of international law, from the Holocaust up to our time. Beginning with East West Street, the trilogy combines the historical, judicial and personal in a literary masterpiece about one of humanity’s most commendable ambitions: That the people behind history’s biggest crimes are held accountable.

Now, Sands concludes his trilogy with 38 Londres Street, about the dictator Augusto Pinochet, the Nazi Walter Rauff and the international legal system’s long effort to catch up with them.

Philippe Sands is a French British writer and human rights lawyer specializing in international law. He has written several award-winning books, and as a lawyer, he has argued a number of high-profile cases in international courts, including for Mauritius, the Phillipines and recently for Palestine’s self-determination.

Critic and writer Karin Haugen is among those who have followed Sands’s work and writing over the years. Now, she will join him for a conversation about the dictator, the Nazi, and the long arm of the law.

This conversation took place during the Festival of Norwegian Non-Fiction 2025.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Due to issues during the recording, the sound quality is somewhat lower than normal.

In the recent memoir of Indian star author and activist Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me, we are given the raw and honest story of Roy’s life and childhood with a many faceted mother who was far from easy to live with.

Arundhati Roy’s mother Mary took her two small children and left her alcoholic husband, brought her own family to court in order to abolish the discriminatory inheritance laws in her home state, and built a unique school that made her a beloved and almost mythical figure of her community and beyond. Towards Roy and her brother, however, she was volatile, sharp and cruel. Still, Roy insists that this forced her to see the world from different vantage point, turning her into the writer she is today.

The memoir also depicts Roy’s own path, leaving home for a world of film, literature and activism, towards a backdrop of India’s growing Hindu nationalist movement, spearheaded by Modi. We witness Roy’s incessant fights against this movement, on behalf of the environment, of local communities and minorities.

As in Roy’s earlier literature, Mother Mary Comes to Me shows us how the personal and political is intimately linked for all of us. Roy portrays her own path as well as those around her with both warmth and bite, in the precise, inventive, and deeply original language that has become one of her distinctive features.

Arundhati Roy is the author of the Booker prize winning The God of Small Things, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and a number of non-fiction books, including My Seditious Heart, Kashmir: The Case for Freedom og Walking with the Comrades.

At the House of Literature, Roy was joined by poet and writer Athena Farrokhzad, for a conversation about her mother, her childhood, and becoming the writer and activist she is today.

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Poet and writer Ocean Vuong has in just a few years established himself as a leading literary voice of his generation. With his own life as a point of departure – born in Vietnam and grown up in a working-class family in the US – his raw and crystal-clear writing deals with war and trauma, immigration experiences, class, masculinity, sexuality and alienation.

In his latest novel, The Emperor of Gladness, we meet 19-year-old Vietnamese-American Hai, as he is about to end his own life, but he is saved by a chance meeting with an old and senile Lithuanian woman, Grazina, and an eclectic group of co-workers in a run-down fast food restaurant.

In Vuong’s America, the idea that the outsiders of society and the working-class poor can escape poverty through hard work is exposed as a lie. The closest they get to a break from their dead end days are drugs, pills or a breather in the restaurant’s freezer. But through the story of Grazina, Hai and his colleagues, he shows how unexpected friendships and care for those around us can be a respite in all the hopelessness.

Ocean Vuong is the winner of the American Book Award, the Mark Twain Award, the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whiting Award, to name a few. He is known for the award-winning and critically acclaimed titles Night Sky With Exit Wounds, Time Is A Mother and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. His poetry is also clearly visible in his novels, vibrating with lyricism and metaphors that say with you after reading.

At the House of Literature, Vuong was joined by the Norwegian poet and editor Priya Bains for a conversation about loss and grief, chosen families and writing about the working-class poor.

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Soukaina Habiballah is from Morocco, and the author of four award-winning poetry collections, a short story collection, a novel and a play, Nini Ya Momo.

This is Soukaina Habiballah’s reading list:

Iman Mersal, Traces of Enayat, (trans. Robin Moger)

                              How To Mend: Motherhood and Its Ghosts (trans. Robin Moger)

Abdelfattah Kilito, Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language, (trans. Waïl S. Hassan)

Laila Lalami, The Moor’s Account

The host in this episode is Åshild Lappegård Lahn

Editing and production by the House of Literature

Music by Ibou Cissokho

The House of Literature’s project to promote African literature is supported by NORAD.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

With his seventh novel, Collapse, Édouard Louis has now completed his celebrated family saga about his own upbringing and family.

Louis writes ruthlessly and skillfully about subjects such as class distinctions, violence, racism, gender, and political power and powerlessness, and his writing has become a point of reference and inspiration for writers across the world. Through the seven novels making up his family saga, he portrays the social structures that are the basis for the violence he experienced as a child, as well as his ambivalence towards his own family and the wider working class. However, he is most ruthless when exposing his own life and flaws.

Louis has two new novels out this year: Collapse and Monique Escapes. In Collapse, Louis explores his older brother’s decline, one he both feared and came to for safety, and who died, aged 38, after a life of alcoholism, poverty, neglect and self-inflicted violence.

In Monique Escapes, he portrays his mother’s escape from yet another destructive and violent relationship, marked by alcohol and degrading treatment. The novel depicts her struggle to find a way out when she has neither money, an education certificate nor a driver’s license.

In both novels, Louis explores how social and economic structures shapes and limits people’s possibilities to create a free life. “The most political thing I do, is portray that which is invisible,” Louis said last time he visited the House of Literature. He returned now to talk about completing his family saga, his literary ruthlessness and the way ahead. He was joined by writer colleague and critic Erlend Loe, who has followed Louis’s body of work closely.

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En octobre 2022, Annie Ernaux a reçu le prix Nobel de littérature, en tant que première femme française, « pour le courage et l'acuité clinique avec lesquels elle découvre les racines, les étrangetés et les contraintes collectives de la mémoire personnelle ». Avec des livres comme Les Années, Une femme et L'Événement, qui font tomber les barrières entre autobiographie, fiction et sociologie, Ernaux a gagné un large lectorat dans le monde entier, et a agrandi ce qui est considéré comme un langage littéraire. D'une écriture économique et non sentimentale, elle fait émerger des expériences collectives à travers des histoires personnelles, et montre comment la classe, le genre et les structures sociales nous façonnent, et comment des événements apparemment mineurs peuvent changer toute une vie.

Les livres d'Ernaux sont à la fois une archéologie personnelle et une analyse sociologique, et montrent comment ce qui est profondément personnel, aussi toujours est politique. La double conscience de classe occupe une place centrale dans son expérience et son œuvre. Elle s'est décrite comme une « émigrante de classe » ou une « transfuge de classe », quelqu'un qui a quitté le monde de la classe ouvrière sans pour autant trouver complètement sa place dans la bourgeoisie.

Cet automne, Ernaux a deux nouvelles publications en norvégien, toutes deux traduites par Henninge Margrethe Solberg. L'Autre fille est écrite comme une lettre à la sœur qu'elle n'a jamais rencontrée, un texte sur le manque, la culpabilité et comment le silence familial peut être aussi formateur que ce qui est effectivement dit. Dans Les Armoires vides, le premier roman d'Ernaux de 1974, s'établit la voix implacable et profondément existentielle qui devait marquer toute son œuvre. Y est racontée l'histoire d'une jeune femme qui tente de surmonter l'expérience d'un avortement illégal, et qui doit démêler le passé pour comprendre comment son éducation a façonné son identité.

De retour à la Maison de littérature, Ernaux a rencontré Kjerstin Aukrust, maître de conférences en littérature française à l’Université d’Oslo, pour une conversation sur la classe, le travail de mémoire et sur comment l'écriture peut devenir une forme d'archéologie de sa propre vie.

La conversation a eu lieu dans la Salle des fêtes de l'Université d’Oslo.

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