Podcast | Lina Wolff | Granta Magazine

Lina Wolff | Podcast

Lina Wolff & Saskia Vogel

Lina Wolff on Dante, the artistic temperament and the tension she feels between a ‘Spanishness’ and ‘Swedishness’ when writing.

In the latest Granta podcast, Saskia Vogel speaks to Lina Wolff, a contributor to the Travel issue and author of the story collection Många människor dör som du (Many People Die Like You) and the novel Bret Easton Ellis och de andra hundarna (Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs). Wolff writes in Swedish, and her story in the issue is based in Spain. Here she discusses the tension she felt between a ‘Spanishness’ and ‘Swedishness’ when writing and between a rational way of being and a magical way of thinking. She also discusses Lorca, Dante, literary travellers and their guides and the idea of irrationality and the artistic temperament.

‘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

In Conversation
The Online Edition
27th August 2013
In Conversation
The Online Edition
27th August 2013

Lina Wolff

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

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

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