LitHouse podcast

The House of Literature in Oslo - Litteraturhuset

LitHouse is the English language podcast from the House of Literature (Litteraturhuset) in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  1. 3D AGO

    A Country Falling Apart: Siri Hustvedt and Karin Haugen

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

    1h 7m
  2. 3D AGO

    A Love Story: Siri Hustvedt and Marte Spurkland

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

    1h 3m
  3. JAN 12

    Reading the Vikings. Eleanor Barraclough and Tore Skeie

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

    48 min

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About

LitHouse is the English language podcast from the House of Literature (Litteraturhuset) in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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