Hanne Orstavik – författare

Shortlisted for the 2020 Republic of Consciousness PrizeWinner of the 2019 PEN America Translation PrizeFinalist for the 2018 National Book Award for Translated LiteratureAs clear and relentless as the cold air, Love unfolds over one winter’s evening. Single mother Vibeke and her son Jon have just moved to a small, remote town in the north of Norway. Tomorrow Jon will be nine. As Vibeke gets changed after work, Jon wonders what surprises his mother has prepared for him. He leaves the house certain she will make him a cake. But preoccupied with concerns of her own, she too ventures out. Inextricably linked yet desperately at odds, mother and son make their lonely ways through the unforgiving night.Beautifully translated into English by Martin Aitken, this edition is the twenty-eighth international publication of Love. Hanne Ørstavik’s astonishing grasp of human fragility and her economy of form power this acknowledged masterpiece of Norwegian literature.

The protagonist of Ti Amo is a woman who is in a deep and real, but relatively new relationship with a man from Milan. She has moved there, they have married, and they are close in every way. Then he is diagnosed with cancer. It’s serious, but they try to go about their lives as best they can. But when the doctor tells the woman that her husband has less than a year to live – without telling the husband – death comes between them. She knows it’s coming, but he doesn’t – and he doesn’t seem to want to know.Ti Amo is an incredibly beautiful and harrowing novel, filled with tenderness and grief, love and loneliness. It delves into the complex emotions of bereavement, and in less than 100 pages manages to encapsulate an extraordinary scope and depth, asking how and for whom we can live, when the one we love best is about to die.

The narrator of this novel is a Norwegian writer living in Milan. A year has passed since the premature death of her Italian husband. She falls in love. M is seventeen years younger than her, but the connection between them is intense and of a kind she has never felt before. Then, as his vulnerability starts showing, so does his troubling rage. She knows this rage. It was always present in her childhood, and it created an all-encompassing fear in her.In Stay with Me, Hanne Ørstavik returns to her theme of love, this time exploring how it can be intertwined with insecurity, fear and violence. How do you recognise love, if fear is the feeling you know?‘Soul-searching on speed. Ørstavik writes with such distressing courage that as a reader, you become sweaty-palmed. Stay with Me is Hanne Ørstavik at her very best; so intense and profound that the unease becomes contagious . . . Above all, she conveys a spiritual openness that feels naked and vibrantly intense.’ Dagbladet

A penetrating study of passion, suffering, and loss from one of Norway’s most tenacious writers: National Book Award Finalist and PEN translation prize winner Hanne ØrstavikCelebrated throughout the world for her candor and sensitivity to the rhythms of language, Hanne Ørstavik is a leading light on the international stage. Ørstavik writes with “a compulsion for truth that feels like [her] very life force itself.” 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. Ti Amo brings a new, deeply personal approach, as the novel is based in Ørstavik’s own experience of losing her Italian husband to cancer. By facing loss directly, she includes readers in an experience that many face in isolation. Written and set in the early months of 2020, its themes of loss and suffering are particularly well suited for a time of international mourning. 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.

La Vibeke, una mare soltera, i el seu fill Jon acaben de traslladar-se a un poble petit del nord de Noruega. És la vigília del novè aniversari d'en Jon i una fira ambulant ha arribat al poble. Mentre el noi surt pel veïnat a vendre bitllets de loteria per al seu club esportiu, la Vibeke, centrada en els propis pensaments i preocupacions, decideix anar a la biblioteca local.Què faran els personatges durant aquesta freda nit d'hivern? Mentre constatem com mare i fill poden viure en mons completament separats, una creixent sensació d'inquietud s'apoderarà de la història.Amor és una novel·la sobre la distància entre els éssers humans, la solitud i la recerca de l'amor.

Esta antología que tenemos entre las manos nos presenta a diez escritoras noruegas contemporáneas, de entre 35 y 85 años, pertenecientes a generaciones y credos literarios muy diversos, pero en las que tal vez podamos también intuir algunos rasgos comunes.Como casi siempre en la literatura, también en estos relatos el tema recurrente son las relaciones humanas. En todos estos cuentos encontramos luces y sombras, otro de los rasgos característicos de la literatura noruega de todos los tiempos. Por lo general, melancolía y realismo aparecen como dos caras de la misma moneda. Los personajes de estos relatos son hombres y mujeres de carne y hueso, con sus anhelos y sus traumas, sus ilusiones y sus decepciones, y una terca búsqueda de algo que proporcione sentido.Cada relato está traducido por un traductor diferente, lo cual pensamos que proporciona una riqueza especial a la antología: diez escritoras y diez traductores, entre los cuales hay tanto latinoamericanos como españoles, cosa que se refleja también en el lenguaje final de los relatos, en los que se ha querido respetar las diferencias y la riqueza de esta lengua que hablamos tantos pueblos distintos.