Pre-talk: Karen Fastrup on Linn Ullmann's authorship and writing style
ONLY FOR THE DIAMOND CLUB: The event has been cancelled due to illness.
Author and translator Karen Fastrup has translated almost everything Linn Ullmann has published in Danish. In 2022 she translated Ullmann's latest novel Girl, 1983 and most recently she translated Ullmann's earlier novel Stella Descending. In other words, there is probably no one in Denmark who is as deeply under the skin of Ullmann's poetic, thoughtful language.
Novels that do not want to be put in boxes
When Linn Ullmann's novel Girl, 1983 about a relationship between a 16-year-old girl and a 44-year-old man came out, many asked if it was a classic #metoo story. Ullmann herself was reluctant to put the novel into that box, and Fastrup understands that - here in an interview with Skønlitteratur on P1 - well:
“Then we would have had an incredibly boring novel, right? Because then it could very easily have become a template. A story we felt we knew in advance before we started reading it, and we don't - not at all - when we read this novel. [The entire authorship is] characterised by not being unambiguous.”
The ambiguous and poetic novels that Ullmann writes, and which cannot easily be put into boxes, you can hear Fastrup talk about in this talk in Royal Danish Library, before Ullmann herself comes on stage that evening.
Participants
Karen Fastrup
Karen Fastrup made her debut with the critically acclaimed novel Brønden from 2000, which the following year was nominated for the DR Book Award. Since then, she has published five novels and translated a sea of different novels from Norwegian, Swedish and English into Danish, including almost all of Linn Ullmann's writing, but also books by Sally Rooney, Karl Ove Knausgård, Vigdis Hjorth and August Strindberg.
Tickets are free for members of the Diamond Club. It requires you to either write to the Diamond Club via email, call or pick up the ticket in our shop.
