LitHouse podcast

Several women who have survived brutal imprisonment and sexual violence in Syria are part of lawsuit initiatives against the current government. How may these initiatives contribute to hold the gover…

How can we understand the movement Gilets Jaunes – the Yellow vests? What does this police violence against blacks say about the official French view of black people?

Édouard Louis’s latest novel, Qu…

Sara Ahmed is a renowned scholar within fields such as feminist theory, queer theory and critical race theory. In her most recent project, Ahmed has interviewed staff and students about their experie…

There is a longstanding literary tradition of portraying the city of Istanbul in writing, both by Turkish and other writers. Where does Turkish writer Burhan Sönmez place himself within this traditio…

The American writer Kristen Roupenian caused a sensation when her debut short story «Cat Person» was published in The New Yorker in 2017. With #Metoo at its peak, the story’s treatment of bad sex mad…

In French Moroccan Leïla Slimani’s books, the psychological development of the characters is what captures the reader. Lullaby explores the interactions of a small upper middle-class family. What pow…

This year marks 101 years since the birth of one of the world’s most influential artists: Ingmar Bergman. The anniversary last year brought renewed focus to his films, but what about his writing?

Dur…

How are the Syrian refugees working today to understand and to process what happened before and during the war? What are their thoughts on the current situation? In her book We Crossed a Bridge and I…

In German Jenny Erpenbeck’s most recent novel, The End of Days, her main character dies a total of five times; first as a baby, then as a young girl in a Europe between two world wars, then as a revo…

Guatemalan writer Eduardo Halfon is a central voice in the new wave of literature from Central America and the Caribbean. The episodic and absurd novel The Polish Boxer moves between the university c…

Valeria Luiselli, translated into more than twenty languages, is a central name in Mexican contemporary literature. Her debut novel, Faces in the crowd, has made critics compare Luiselli to writers s…

In her essay Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions, the Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli explores the fates of Latin American child migrants in and on their way to the US. Luiselli herself liv…

A. S. Byatt was named one of Britain’s fifty greatest writers by The Times in 2008. Her literary breakthrough, Possession: A Romance, was awarded the prestigious Booker Prize. Byatt visited the House…

Daniel Mendelsohn is a Classics professor, and teaches his students the classic epic The Odyssey. One Spring, his 81 year old father decides to take his class. But what kind of a hero was Oddyseus, r…

Ariel Levy is a successful journalist in The New Yorker, where she often writes about women who break with the traditional expectations in how you express and live gender and sexuality. She has a nic…

The Sellout is about an America so steeped in its racist history that race becomes unavoidable. But nobody wants to talk about it, and there is no end of human oblivion, foolishness and evil. The Gua…

Autumn (translated into Norwegian by Merete Alfsen) is the first in Scottish Ali Smith’s season quartet. Winter has already come out in English. In both books, hope, warmth, sensuality and humanity i…

In this episode, you can hear a lecture by Oxford historian and author of The Silk Roads, Peter Frankopan, about the history of the Crusades, as seen from Asia. The lecture was delivered as part of t…

Colson Whiteheads novel The Underground Railroad was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. It soon became a #1 New York Times Bestseller, it got picked by Oprah Winfrey for her…

In this episode, you can hear a conversation between Martin Puchner and Helge Jordheim about literature’s role in shaping the world. What came first – the world as we know it, or the stories about th…