Linn Ullmann (NO) in conversation with Lise Bach Hansen
In her writing, Linn Ullmann mixes autobiographical memoirs, fiction and documentary material. This Spring, you can experience her at the International Authors' Stage.
The award-winning Norwegian writer, critic and cultural journalist Linn Ullmann mixes autobiographical memoirs, fiction and documentary material in her writing. This Spring, you can experience her at the International Authors' Stage in conversation with Lise Bach Hansen.
With her latest novel Girl, 1983, the Norwegian author Linn Ullmann unravels desire, memories and the repressed in order to retell and take ownership of her own story.
Lost in the world
When the 16-year-old female protagonist in Ullmann's Girl, 1983 gets lost in the streets of Paris one winter night in 1983, she must search for the only address she knows: the address of the thirty-year-old photographer who has flown her in. But it is not only in the streets of Paris that she has lost her way.
She is a young person who is trying to carve out a corner of life for herself in a big, strange and incomprehensible world - a place where she can succeed and where she is not 'just' the daughter of "the world's most beautiful woman", as she calls her mother in the book. During the story, she is regularly in contact with her ageing mother, who in her time originally forbade the young girl to go to Paris. A ban that she defied.
In this way, the book becomes a kind of continuation of Ullmann's previous book Unquiet, in which she also writes about being the child of an aging father with a colossal cultural personality.
"By writing what happened, by telling the story as truthfully as I can, I'm trying to bring them together in one body – the woman from 2021 and the girl from 1983. I don't know if that's possible."
When Ullmann writes about trauma and tangled memories, it is the lack, the forgotten or repressed, that is at the centre. Everything from the winter of 1983, which she cannot remember today, becomes a starting point for examining the process and feelings from then to now.
The young girl's desire
During the last years of #metoo, we have seen a steady stream of books that illuminate and explore the desire of the young girl. Vanessa Springora in France, Kate Elizabeth Russell in America and Cecilie Lind here at home are just some of the authors who have signed up to the international cultural study of that particular subject.
It is a desire that has historically been seen, simplistic and distorted, as a reflection of the older man. The young girl has been culturally first and foremost an object of desire. But in the dynamic between man and girl, power and powerlessness, abuser and victim, there may not be room to create anything other than that.
Why it is so important to nuance the language and the narratives we use to talk about the young girl is just one of the things that Linn Ullmann will touch on in the live interview.
Participants
Linn Ullmann
With her seven novels so far, Linn Ullmann has established herself as a significant voice in recent Scandinavian literature. Her critically acclaimed and award-winning writing is published in large parts of Europe and in the United States. Girl, 1983 was nominated for the Nordic Council's Literature Prize in 2022.
Lise Bach Hansen
Lise Bach Hansen is the curator for International Authors' Stage and in connection with that, has previously interviewed, among others, Siri Hustvedt, Alex Schulman and Mathilda Gustavsson - when she unraveled a major #metoo case in Swedish cultural life and kick-started the #metoo wave throughout the Nordics with her novel The Club. Lise Bach Hansen is also involved in many larger Nordic cultural contexts.
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