DIGITAL: NORLA's activities during the Norwegian Festival of Literature in Lillehammer

• Instead of a physical festival at Lillehammer there will be a free digital festival May 29-31 – the largest of it’s kind in the Nordic region.
  The program will be available world wide via TV, radio and online, broadcast by NRK, The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation.
  See the complete program in Norwegian here (and some events in English here).
• The festival’s children’s book program – the Pegasus program – is postponed until September, when schools and kindergartens hopefully are back to normal.
• The Sigrid Undset Days will be back! It once formed the basis of the festival itself (in 1993), in the form of a seminar on Sigrid Undset’s writing. In November the Sigrid Undset Days will resume, in the Nobel laureate’s home (and now museum) Bjerkebæk. The program will take place November 21-22, which is exactly 100 years after the first publication of Kransen, volume I of Undset’s masterpiece: the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy.

As a premiere to it all, on March 26, the festival organized the world’s (possibly) smallest festival. This micro digital festival offered conversations with authors taking place in a former telephone booth that has been converted into a reading kiosk. The program, in Norwegian only, was live streamed on Facebook (about the event here).

NORLA’s activities

Unfortunately, NORLA’s planned seminar and program for international publishers and translators of children’s and YA books is cancelled due to the cancellation of the physical festival. However, the 16 fellows, i.e. international publishers, are invited to a digital seminar – webinar – with presentations by eight selected authors of children’s and YA literature. There will also be speed-dating with Norwegian literary agents, as well as group sessions.
The webinar will take place on Thursday, May 28 and Friday, May 29.

NORLA also organizes a webinar for all the translators who applied for this year’s Lillehammer seminar. There will be a total of 17 participants, who translate into 12 different languages, in a webinar on Wednesday, 27 May. Here the translators will become better acquainted with each other, as well as with NORLA’s staff, and they will get presentations by the authors and illustrators of the same eight children’s and young adult books as in the fellowship webinar. In addition there will be a translation workshop on an excerpt of Ane Barmen’s novel Dreams Mean Nothing (original title: Draumar betyr ingenting). The book was awarded the 2019 Brage Prize and is also nominated for the 2020 Nordic Council Children and Young People’s Literature Prize.

We are looking forward to meeting the participants in both webinars!

NORLA’s planned activities were:

International publisher’s seminar

Each year NORLA and The Norwegian Publishers Association invite foreign publishers to a seminar on Norwegian literature at the Norwegian Festival of Literature. This year’s theme was to be literature for children and young adults. The seminar was, like last year, advertised as a fellowship, and there was a great deal of interest in participating.
On the seminar’s first day publishers should have been meeting Norwegian colleagues in Oslo. The following day they would have been doing a tour visiting some of the central Norwegian publishers and literary agents before taking the train to Lillehammer. At Lillehammer they would have, in addition to the culture program, been given presentations by a group of current writers of Norwegian children’s and young adult literature.
The seminar is normally supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Translator Seminar

NORLA has been inviting translators to attend the literature festival in Lillehammer for 25 years, and this year we welcomed applications from translators of Norwegian literature with a special interest in children’s and young adult books.
In addition to participating in the literature festival program, the translators should have, along with a group of international publishers, been given presentations by several current Norwegian writers of children’s and young adult literature. We had really been looking forward to providing input that hopefully would have been useful in the translators’ future work.

Read more

Visit the festival’s website.

Did you know that in 2017, the Norwegian Festival of Literature at Lillehammer was named one of the best literature festivals in the world by Penguin Random House The Writers’ Academy?
And in 2017, Lillehammer was also named a creative city of literature in the UNESCO Creative Cities Network.