‘I think in the beginning it was a crisis. I started to write because I felt the need to fit in, and not be an outsider… I have felt bound to an outsideness and an otherness.’
Image by Kristianstads kommun
Lina Wolff on Dante, the artistic temperament and the tension she feels between a ‘Spanishness’ and ‘Swedishness’ when writing.
‘I think in the beginning it was a crisis. I started to write because I felt the need to fit in, and not be an outsider… I have felt bound to an outsideness and an otherness.’
Image by Kristianstads kommun
‘I want the poem to destroy time. / What are the ceremonies of forgetting?’
An elegy by Nick Laird for his father, Alastair Laird, who died in 2021 of Covid-19. Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem.
‘In the place where I grew up there were horses, thighs moving like nudity under their fur’
From Amnion by Stephanie Sy-Quia, published by Granta Books and shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection.
‘My brother and I hurried through sloppy postures of praise, quiet as the light pooling around us.’
A poem by Kaveh Akbar, from his shortlisted collection Pilgrim Bell, first published in Granta 156: Interiors.
‘I wanted to and then / Remembered why I want to never’
Poetry by Shane McCrae, shortlisted for Cain Named the Animal.
‘Would / the apple be concerned / if I said it was not an apple’
Poems by Padraig Regan, from Some Integrity, shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection.
Lina Wolff’s debut novel, Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs, published by And Other Stories in 2016, was awarded the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, Sweden’s Vi Magazine Literature Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2013 Swedish Radio Award for Best Novel of the Year. Her second novel, The Polyglot Lovers, won Sweden’s biggest domestic literary prize, the August Prize, as well as the Svenska Dagbladet Prize, and has been translated into eighteen languages. A collection of short stories is forthcoming from And Other Stories in 2020.
More about the author →Saskia Vogel is an author and translator from Los Angeles, now living in Berlin. Permission, her debut novel, about love, loss and BDSM, was published in four languages in 2019. She has translated leading Swedish authors such as Lina Wolff, Karolina Ramqvist, Johannes Anyuru, and Katrine Marcal, whose Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? is published by Portobello Books. Her translations and writing have appeared in publications such as Guernica, the White Review, the Offing, Paris Review Daily, LitHub and Two Lines. Previously, she worked as Granta magazine’s publicist.
Photograph © Fette Sans
‘When we were sixteen years old, I broke Johnny’s nose with the back of my hand.’
‘No one here is normal except you, and you’re not even from Spain.’
‘Oline Stig doesn’t blindly obey the narrow logic of the dramatic curve, and she lets the story branch where it is necessary. The end is surprising and, so to say, out of tune in a liberating way.’
‘You don’t understand. The country where I used to live is now gone.’
‘The self is the work of art. Criticism puts that self in the service of other art.’
The authors discuss the multiplicity of the self, the idea of necessity, and how to work with what you lack.
‘Before I begin I'd like to say that I'll try to remember everything as best I can, though sometimes I know it won't be right.’
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