Join us on September 15 for a discussion and presentation on The Home of the Drowned! Author Elin Anna Labba will discusses her multigenerational saga of Sámi women fighting for their way of life with Elsa Stamatopoulou (former Chief of the Secretariat, United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues).
Nothing is true, and everything is true; poetry will never hurt more than what has happened. Every summer, Iŋgá, her mother Rávdná, and her Aunt Ánne travel west to their village on the lake. But the summer Iŋgá is thirteen, they arrive to find their home and possessions have disappeared under water, the land flooded by a dam built to supply hydropower to a society that has continually stolen from them.
The Home of the Drowned follows these women’s fortunes over forty years—from 1942 to 1982—as the water their people have lived near for centuries is transformed into a menacing force that threatens all they hold dear. Defying the authorities, Rávdná decides to build a proper house on the lake to replace what was lost, becoming an unlikely activist even as her actions isolate her family from the rest of the community. Meanwhile, Ánne’s health is in decline, and a concerned Iŋgá merely longs to live like everyone else—an impossible wish when the Swedish state is relentlessly drowning her world.
Drawing on her own family’s history of forced relocation and violent colonial dispossession, Elin Anna Labba’s debut novel brings Sámi history to the fore through this intimate story. In poetic prose deftly translated by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, she reveals connections between land, water, and people that hauntingly reverberate with the question: what is it that makes a home?
Out now from University of Minnesota Press, The Home of the Drowned “paints a stunning portrait of the tenacity of an Indigenous people jarred, displaced, and neglected by so-called progress” (Jon Hickey, author of Big Chief).
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Elin Anna Labba is a Sámi writer and journalist from the arctic region of Sweden. She has worked as an editor for Sámi magazines and as director of Tjállegoahte, the Sámi Writers’ Centre, which is dedicated to promoting Sámi literature. Her first book, The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow: The Forced Displacement of the Northern Sámi, also published in translation by the University of Minnesota Press, was awarded Sweden’s 2020 August Prize for Best Nonfiction along with several other prestigious awards. In 2024, Labba was appointed Honorary Doctor of Philosophy at Luleå University of Technology in recognition of her contribution to both literary and public discourse and for giving voice to communities shaped by historical and environmental change. The Swedish publication of The Home of the Drowned was awarded the Norrland Literature Prize in 2025.
ABOUT THE MODERATOR
Elsa Stamatopoulou is a human rights and social justice advocate and researcher, and the Former Chief of the Secretariat, United Nations Permanent Forum on Ιndigenous Issues and Former Director, Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Program at Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights. With an academic background in law, international law, criminal justice and political science (Athens Law School, Vienna University, Northeastern University (USA), Graduate Institute of International Studies at the University of Geneva), Stamatopoulou has worked on international normative frameworks, institution-building, the rights of Indigenous Peoples, minorities and other groups, women’s rights, cultural rights, development and international cooperation. She has collaborated closely with human rights non-governmental organizations around the world and has received awards including the Lifetime Achievement Award by the New York City Bar Association, 2024; the Ingrid Washinawatok El Issa O’Peqtaw Metaehmoh-Flying Eagle Woman Peace, Justice and Sovereignty Award; the award of the NGO Committee on the Decade of the World’s Indigenous Peoples; the Eleanor Roosevelt Award of the Human Rights Center and of Voices 21; the Innovation in Academia Award for Arts & Culture, 2016, University of Kent (UK); in 2010, the Museum “Tepee of the World” was given her name in the Republic of Sakha, Russia. In 2016, she was featured as one of the UN’s 80 Leading Women from 1945-2016. In 2026 she received 2026 Repairer Leadership Award of the International Center for Multi-Generational Legacies of Trauma (ICMGLT). She co-chairs the International Commission on the Chittagong Hill Tracts and is on the Board of the International Work Group on Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA) and other boards.