On October 17, please join Scandinavia House and World Poetry Books to hear readings from and discussions of recent Scandinavian literature appearing in English! Translators Martin Aitken, Larissa Kyzer, Damion Searls, and Kira Josefsson will present their translations of celebrated Nordic writers Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jon Fosse, Judish Kiros, and Steinunn G. Helgadóttir, among others. This program takes place as part of Colloquy: Translators in Conversation, a live event and radio series hosted by World Poetry Books in New York City.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Kira Josefsson is a writer and literary translator working between Swedish and English. In her translation, Judith Kiros’s O was a finalist for the Barrios Book in Translation Prize, and Johanna Hedman’s The Trio was on the shortlist for the Bernard Shaw Prize. Her two translations of Ia Genberg have been shortlisted and longlisted for the International Booker Prize. She lives in New York City, where she writes on US issues in the Swedish press. She organizes with the National Writers Union.
Larissa Kyzer is a writer and Icelandic-English literary translator. Her translation work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the European Union Prize for Literature, the Fulbright Commission, the American-Scandinavian Foundation, the Icelandic Literature Center, Reykjavík UNESCO City of Literature, and Finland’s Kone Foundation. She is on the steering committee of the National Writers Union’s Literary Translators Division, on the board of the American Literary Translators Association, and in the process of launching Great Auk Books, a micropress dedicated to experimental Icelandic poetry and prose.
Damion Searls has translated more than a dozen books by Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse, as well as Victoria Kielland and Dag Solstad from Norwegian and many other modern classics from German, French, and Dutch; he is currently co-translating J.P. Heinesen’s The Driftwood Man from Faroese. His own books include the novel Analog Days, The Mariner’s Mirror, The Inkblots, and The Philosophy of Translation.
