LitHouse podcast

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.youngThe host in this episode is Åshild Lappegård LahnEditing and production by the House of LiteratureMusic by Ibou Cissokho The House of Literature’s project to promote African literature is supported by NORAD.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

«The moral component of history, the most necessary component, is simply a single questions, asked over and over again: When it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power?» One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El AkkadThe lack of a response from the West to Israel’s brutal war in Gaza reveals how the West values certain lives more than others, according to author and journalist Omar El Akkad. For El Akkad, born in Egypt and raised in Qatar, the West long represented the polar opposite to everything he hated about the Middle East: The corruption, the censorship, the surveillance, the exaltation of corrupt leaders.As a teenager, El Akkad moved with his family to North America, and became a part of the liberal Western world order. Despite a few reservations, he kept his faith in the West as a region committed to human rights, freedom, justice and respect for the law. Until October 8th, 2023, when Israel launched their latest war against Gaza.The essay collection One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a reckoning with what El Akkad considers to be the West’s double standards. He exposes rhetoric and euphemisms that allow murder on innocent civilians, that necessitates the new acronym WCNSF (wounded child, no surviving family), and shows how the Gaza war is part of a longer history of us versus them.Omar El Akkad is an award-winning author and journalist of many years. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is his first non-fiction book, it has garnered broad attention and is under translation into a number of languages.At the House of Literature, El Akkad was joined by author and journalist Yohan Shanmugaratnam for a conversation about anger, the suffering in Gaza and Western double standards.The event was supported by NORAD.

When Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie publishes her first novel in 12 years, it is a real event. With award winning and critically acclaimed titles such as Americanah, Half of a Yellow Sun and We Should All Be Feminists, Adichie has attracted a large readership across the world.Both in her novels and in her non-fiction, she explores what it means to be a woman and a feminist in the world today, and through her own books as well as the many aspiring writers she mentors and influences, she contributes to a greater diversity of stories and literary voices.In her new novel, Dream Count, we follow four women who, each in their own way, come up against societal expectations and limits as to what women can do and ask for. Chiamaka spends the pandemic lockdown recounting all her failed relationships, Zikora tries to track down her ex, who left her when she became pregnant, Omelogor starts a blog addressed to men, and the maid Kadiatou tries to carve out a new life for herself and her daughter in the US.Weaving together their histories, and in close portraits of the four women, Adichie explores female experiences such as society’s expecations for when you are to marry and have children, darker themes like abortion and female genital mutilation, but also female solidarity and sisterhood.Since her literary debut in 2003, Chimamanda Adichie has become a literary and feminist icon, and she has introduced African literature to readers across the world.She has been awarded the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, the Orange Prize and the US National Book Critics Circle Award, just to mention a few. Her books have been translated into more than 30 languages.In Oslo, she was joined by journalist and editor Jessika Gedin for a conversation about women’s experiences, society’s expectations and the universal need to be loved.The conversation took place in the University of Oslo’s Ceremonial Hall and was supported by NORAD.

Wole Talabi is a Nigerian science fiction author. He is best known for his short stories, most of them collected in the collections Incomplete Solutions and Convergence Problems. His latest novel Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon won the prestigious Nommo award for best novel. Talabi has also edited the anthologies Africanfuturism and Mothersound, both central publications in African fantasy and science fiction.  This is Talabi’s reading list:-       Nnedi Okorafor, Lagoon-       Kojo Laing, Woman of the Aeroplanes-       Lauren Beukes, Zoo City-       Tade Thompson, Rosewater-       Tlotlo Tsamaase, Womb City-       T. L. Huchu, Library of the DeadHe also mentions:-       Ben Okri-       Chinua Achebe-       Wole Soyinka-       Carmen Maria Machado-       Arthur C. Clarke-       Isaac Asimov-       Larry Niven, Ringworld-       Jerry Pournelle-       Cyprian Ekwensi-       Flora Nwapa-       Pemi Aguda, Ghostroots-       Amos Tutuola, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and The Palm-Wine Drinkard The host in this episode is Daniel Røkholt. 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.