The Norway Model
How the Scandinavian country became a literary powerhouse.
NOVEMBER 30, 2023
On the train heading inland along Norway’s largest lake, Mjøsa, I felt ill at ease with my task. I was on my way to Lillehammer, a small town whose claim to fame is that it hosted the 1994 Winter Olympics, to attend the Norwegian Festival of Literature, which bills itself as “the largest of its kind in the Nordic countries.”
Norway, a country of 5.5 million people, has in the last decade exported more buzzy books than any of its larger neighbors. I was here to report on the great mystery of why that was. Why does Norwegian literature do disproportionately well abroad? Is it just a matter of state funding? Or could it have something to do with Norwegian habits of self-portraiture and the way that books made in Norway tend to correspond to expectations and demands elsewhere? Or might it be that our most exportable heavyweight writers, Nobel laureate Jon Fosse among them, were a generation bred in a now bygone ecosystem of in-house magazines, literary journals and academic hubs? The festival seemed like a good place to try to answer these questions.
I got off at the station and walked through town, running into colleagues and acquaintances on every corner. One of them shouted in passing, “This is so intense; everybody’s here!” The Norwegian Festival of Literature is more businesslike than other Norwegian book events. Here, foreign agents and publishers speed date in hotel conference rooms. Deals are made backstage. Publishers hold court in pubs and restaurants, buttering up writers, nursing their needy egos. Readers, in this setting, sometimes seem like an afterthought.
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As a Norwegian writing about Norwegian cultural exports for non-Norwegian readers, I was in an inherently awkward position. Anything I said on the topic would inevitably feel like a lie either at home or abroad, or at least too sweeping in its Olympian perspective. It was a discomfort that, I supposed, mirrored the awkwardness that comes with most exchanges between languages. Something is lost, something is added, and one rarely feels in control of what that something is. A friend scoffed when I told him about the assignment. He said, “So you’re going to write one of those essays that pander to American prejudices about Norwegian literature, full of generalizations about earnest and esoteric Norwegians, sprinkling in details about midnight sun and the monarchy?” “Yes,” I said. “That’s exactly what I will do.”
Norwegians want to see Norway as foreigners with an interest in Norway want to see it.
Just as every Scandinavian country is rich with stereotypes that we compulsively use to differentiate amongst ourselves – in this cluster of countries that, from the outside, looks homogenous – the national literatures of the region can be swept into easy caricatures. If feeling patriotic, I could say that the politically correct Swedes are Freudian suppression machines whose demons will be their undoing, and that their books reflect their neurosis. Swedish literature is sincere and classically oriented, painting in broad and confident strokes about Nature or Love or History. If feeling chauvinistic, I could say that the Danes, on the other hand, write about drugs, violence, class and menstruation. I could say that they are nihilistic hedonists whose racism and sexism are not as charming and liberated as they think, their artists and writers endlessly regurgitating buzzwords from the same 10 pop philosophers, forever rambling about states of exception and homo sacer, micro utopias and the uncanny, the cleansing effects of blood and horror, as if the 1990s never ended.
Norwegian literature as a whole, on the other hand, could be reduced to a very different kind of caricature, one that might help explain some of its relative success abroad. Norwegian novels are toned down, rarely noticeably conceptual, rarely in direct conversation with theory or tradition. Here, you find page after page of plot driven middle-class angst, minimalism and melancholy, closeness to nature, mellowness, humility, and what presents itself as stripped-down honesty. Here and there a funny novel does appear, but when it does, it’s usually funny in a purely observational and demonstratively folksy way.
If the most popular books in Norway are anything to go by, Norwegians want to read novels with straightforward and humorless sentences about sore family relationships. They don’t want metaphors or wordiness or intertextuality. Efforts at high-literary aestheticism are seen as either immature or shallow or elitist. Excessive use of adjectives is seen as a moral failure. Nothing wrong with this kind of ethos. But what’s peculiar in Norway is how the average reader and the most influential critics alike speak as if this set of preferences were not a matter of taste and inclination but something more like a law of nature: a hierarchy of styles written in the stars, and not forms that come and go, made relevant or irrelevant by the wants and needs of every new generation and each individual writer.
People stick to their lot here, forever bound by the imperative to “write what you know.” To insist on writing about what you do not know — by, for instance, venturing into other people’s fields of expertise — can feel like an immoral endeavor in a country where the writers, readers and publishers who hold the most sway are so fanatically “down to earth” that they can make anyone with a penchant for theory or abstraction want to hide under a rock in pure shame.
In other words: Norwegian literature looks at itself in a way that lends itself well to exoticism, with its insistence on realness, on authenticity. Norwegians want to see Norway as foreigners with an interest in Norway want to see it. This makes it a good sell. Where the Danes and the Swedes see themselves as continental, in more direct conversation with France and Germany, there is something distinctly insular about the Norwegian literary scene that perhaps produces a more palpably local literature.
Karl Ove Knausgård, Dag Solstad and Jon Fosse — the three most internationally acclaimed Norwegian writers alive — all have personas that fit with foreign imaginations of “the north.” Each of these writers, in his own way, is gruff, nostalgic and, one might argue, reactionary, longing for a different world, one that would fit him better. All three have a hermit vibe, eyes lit with dreams of God or Marx. They all seem not to want the public’s eye on them, and yet to really want it, in a manner that works for some kinds of personalities but might seem too coy and self-conscious for others to pull off. Somewhere in my notes I have quoted the American critic James Wood calling them “Norwegian literature’s Little Brain, Big Brain and Galactic Brain,” but I can’t find the citation anywhere and thus suspect I have made it up. Are these long-haired neurotics Great Writers, or are they 1) really good-looking (Knausgård), 2) really good at writing opening scenes and caricaturing his contemporaries (Solstad) and 3) gnostic and icy and unapologetically boring (Fosse)? Will these authors hold up a hundred years from now? I think they might, but for now, who knows. I profoundly love books by all of them, but regarding their Greatness, the jury is out. It is like asking: Are French New Wave films good, or do they just have really nice eyeliner?
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In addition to the Norwegian Festival of Literature, two other parallel events were taking place on the second floor of the Lillehammer bank building. These events were in conjuncture with the festival and mentioned in the festival program, but arranged by separate entities with their own agendas. One was a conference on literary translation hosted by NORLA, an organization whose sole purpose is to promote Norwegian literature abroad. The other was the Critics’ Seminar, which gathered most of the country’s book reviewers for a two-day meta-conversation about criticism.
The NORLA conference had gathered publishers and translators from across the world to prepare for Norway being the guest of honor at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair in 2026.
“Norway has in recent years become a literary superpower,” one of the women working for NORLA told me. She and her colleagues travel the world spreading the Norwegian word, financed by the Norwegian Ministry of Culture. Since its founding in 1978, NORLA has bankrolled the translation of almost 8,000 books from Norwegian to 72 different languages. NORLA organizes seminars for publishers and translators, books international tours for Norwegian writers and chooses a list of “focus titles” it promotes abroad each year. These books are picked based not just on merit and domestic success but also on outside interest and relevance.
When I published my first book, being selected for NORLA’s focus list was what made all the fun things happen. Suddenly, I was meeting readers in Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and the Netherlands, which allowed me to experience the little bliss of being read in a context where I was liberated from my dialect, my past, whatever social markers a fellow Norwegian might glean from my name. My little sentences could do that thing that the need to write is so often about, to let one live a double existence, to live twice, simultaneously. All this because someone at NORLA had decided my obscure nonfiction was worth a push.
Feeling perhaps a bit overly honored to see Norway named guest of honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2019, the Norwegian government poured $5.4 million into literary infrastructure, resulting in a boom of translations, and making the country a sought-after guest at other book fairs. In the following years, it would be announced as guest of honor at book fairs in, among other places, Warsaw, Leipzig and Cairo.
Onstage in Lillehammer, the head of the Bologna Children’s Book Fair said she was excited for once to have a guest country that she knows will come impeccably prepared. The room laughed with recognition. Everyone there had already experienced NORLA’s organizational prowess.
They said the key to why books from Norway do well is the seamless way in which all parts of the literary ecosystem work together: politicians and agents, lawmakers and publishing houses, readers and libraries.
As I sat in the back of the room, listening to the many speakers who sang NORLA’s praise, I scrolled through their homepage, looking for rhetorical clues as to how, exactly, organizations like this understand their own wielding of power. I cringed when I read the line “Norwegian literature conquers the world” on the homepage for the Norwegian monarchy, royalcourt.no, regarding a speech the crown princess made when she was the official face of Norway at the Frankfurt Book Fair. To write a sentence like that perhaps requires a deep sense of cultural innocence — one can hardly imagine the House of Windsor getting away with the same kind of rhetoric. In 2019, the princess arrived in Frankfurt on a train with a posse of Norwegian writers whom she had interviewed, surrounded by cameras, during the journey from Norway to the book fair. A clever publicity stunt aimed at people who find monarchies exotic.
When asked why Norwegian writers have been so visible in the Anglophone world these last 10 years — compared with writers from bigger countries like Germany, which produces many more books — people at the NORLA conference talked about “the Norwegian model,” by which they meant a culture of cooperation. They said the key to why books from Norway do well is the seamless way in which all parts of the literary ecosystem work together: politicians and agents, lawmakers and publishing houses, readers and libraries.
It can be argued that the heart of this collaborative spirit is “the standard contract,” a template used for most book deals that, among other things, ensures that the most marginal poet gets the same cut of their sales as a bestselling crime writer — an efficient incentive for publishing houses to at least try to keep themselves broadly oriented.
At the conference, NORLA also underlined that translators are its most important talent scouts, not agents, making passion rather than profit the driving force of the literary export machinery. A month after the conference, NORLA gathered 150 translators from across the world at a retreat in the countryside. The application process for participating in the gathering had been open to anyone with a love for translation, and I assume NORLA encouraged all the attendees to like what they liked in the pool of Norwegian books and then to take it from there.
NORLA’s work is part of a large but fragile machinery, both domestically and abroad. Internationally, they collaborate with equivalent offices in other countries, facilitating exchanges between writers and translators. The director of NORLA, Margit Walsø, also chairs the European Network of Literary Translation. Within Norway, NORLA is reliant on a political goodwill that is constantly being negotiated. In March this year, the so-called Book Law was ratified in Norway, strengthening the position of non-mainstream literature by dictating fixed prices and declaring a commitment to making a wide range of books available both in minority languages and geographical nooks within the country. These little bureaucratic victories are immensely impactful in counteracting the cartel business of the large publishing houses. State funding can help small publishing houses survive among the big ones and their notorious lack of imagination, thus ensuring a lively book scene that once in a while will give birth to something great.
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I slept where the critics slept, at the foot of the Olympic Ski Jump Tower, uphill from the festival, in a cluster of sports facilities that, abandoned for the summer, felt like the ruins of an ancient civilization. In the morning, I watched the critics descend on Lillehammer and chuckled, imagining them as little Greek gods leaving their Olympic perspectives for the mess of the town fair.
At some point, I left the NORLA entourage for the Critics’ Seminar and ended up just staying put there, in one stuffy room where academics and critics tried to articulate their disagreements — sorting tastes, ideas and forms, deciding who’s an idiot and who’s a genius.
Meanwhile, downstairs, famous authors — mainly Norwegian ones, but also prominent Ukrainian, Russian, American, Palestinian, Swedish and Danish writers — answered questions about themselves under chandeliers in the banquet hall.
Literary reverie can get extra awkward in small countries like Norway, where Anglophone writers in particular, who perhaps never made it as big as they may have wanted in their home countries, can become locally world famous just by showing interest in us. I was never interested in writers. Sentences, stories and theories, yes, but not writers, distilling their message onstage, as bodies and minds in a room, with all the pathetic finitude that comes with that position. Books to me are tools, unholy things with which I build myself and tear myself apart. Their writers often just stand in the way. Not having any talent for fandom, I find that the cult of personality surrounding well-known writers, especially foreign ones, can feel blasphemous, and malapropos of the work.
And so I stayed put at the Critics’ Seminar, missing out on the festival. Two years earlier the seminar had been hosted by culturally pessimistic middle-aged men who modeled themselves on the likes of Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer, aspiring to the role of clairvoyant, charismatic curmudgeon. This year, the millennials had done the programming and you could taste the backlash. They had made a program revolving around a discussion of “subjectivity” – signaling an activistic departure from their elders´ cultural conservatism.
A young scholar from the Afrofuturism research group at the University of Oslo gave a lecture saying that the days when one could expect to speak without being held accountable are over, and that “subjectivity” is the educated, middle-class word for what the disenfranchised call “identity.”
A youngish Danish writer read a plea for a revolution that would take money out of the equation in the literary ecosystem, creating a world where even a murderous review of her work could be read as an act of love because it wouldn’t threaten her ability to put food on the table.
As they spoke, a disciple of the Harold Bloom school of Olympian literary judgment crossed his arms. He looked like he was boiling with rage.
I sat in the middle, feeling neither old nor young, thinking that clinging too tightly to the pendulum of fashionable ideas as it swings is always a fated thing. Afterward, we drank beer in the park and everybody shined a little. Theirs was the glow of people who take profound joy in deep disagreement.
At its best, literary translation is the strongest antidote imaginable to Anglophone cultural hegemony. At its worst it is just the swapping of one superpower for another, as most countries will never be able to afford funding their own literary outreach.
How is subjective experience translated within an industry that trades in portraits of whole cultures? For the most part, the Norwegian books that do well internationally seem to coincide somewhat with what does well domestically, but there are many exceptions. While many of the most critically appreciated contemporary novelists in Norway are women, such as Vigdis Hjorth and Trude Marstein, the ones who make it really big elsewhere tend to be men. Perhaps these male writers just happen to write in ways that are more specific to their time and place, less similar to things that could be written elsewhere. Or perhaps the foreigner’s fantasy of the brisk northerner expects something traditionally “manly.”
There are the “untranslatable” authors, such as Øyvind Rimbereid, possibly my favorite living Norwegian poet, whose books contain fictive languages and a play with time and dialect that defies translation. His most famous book, Solaris korrigert (“Solaris corrected”), is a sci-fi epic poem written in a made-up language vaguely reminiscent of a particular Norwegian dialect, mixed with old Norse, English and Scottish. It takes place in a technologically advanced society on the ocean floor in the year 2480, where workers as well as natural resources are brutally exploited. The subject matter should lend itself perfectly to foreign readers, but the form is perhaps too strange to travel, too interesting, too inventive.
Then there are examples of the opposite, like the profoundly weird short stories of Gunnhild Øyehaug, hailed in The New Yorker as “a Norwegian master of the short story” but underacknowledged at home. (This line too is by James Wood, one of the handful of English and American literary influencers who has often traveled to Oslo and bedazzled the book scene). His praise is called for: Øyehaug´s work is funny and absurd and very clearly inspired by Anglophone writers such as Mary Ruefle and Lydia Davis, perhaps making it travel easier into languages that are already accustomed to her form.
Some literary subject matter sparks interesting public conversations domestically while seeming ill suited for export, such as books rooted in experiences with class and race. One can imagine that this has to do with the outside world assuming that Norwegians are wealthy and white. From the outside, Norwegian rags-to-riches stories or novels about immigrant experiences seem not to fit the brand. One might wonder when a nonwhite Norwegian writer will ever do well in, say, the American or French market, if those countries will ever be interested in cultural products from Scandinavia that are made by someone who doesn’t fit their profile of a Scandinavian.
On the evening after the Bologna event, NORLA’s guests were taken to dinner in a farmhouse-turned-mansion by the river. I sat next to a 28-year-old literary agent and editor from Cairo who had inherited parts of her father’s publishing empire. Across from us sat the head of NORLA and the head of the Bologna Children’s Book Fair. Both of them were mellow and beautiful, the Norwegian in a shy way, the Italian devastatingly elegant, in rust-red silk and rust-red jewelry. The director of NORLA told me the story of how she, on a fluke early in her career, got to go to the Frankfurt Book Fair for the first time. It was a revelation. This was it, she thought. That totally internationalized world of books swapping hands in giant conference centers was the one she wanted to work in.
At its best, literary translation is the strongest antidote imaginable to Anglophone cultural hegemony. At its worst it is just the swapping of one superpower for another, as most countries will never be able to afford funding their own literary outreach. I thought I had spotted a grotesque example of this when I heard that 31 Norwegian authors were touring the Czech Republic and Slovakia this summer — I pictured them stealing limelight from local writers. But on closer inspection it turned out that each visiting writer was paired with a homegrown one, each duo traveling together from city to city. Little moves like this make the industry of literary translation that much more likable. The most efficient way to ensure a more pluralistic flora of books would perhaps be for NORLA and the many offices like it across the world to agree to divvy up their money and spend half of it on literary imports. Each office could give according to its ability and take according to its need. But because literary export is tied up with the wants and needs of Foreign Interests Offices, more money will always be earmarked export than import, as part of a county’s effort to establish a good brand name abroad. This gives rich countries dipropionate visibility on the global literary scene. There is no hiding the fact that literary translation is and probably always will be a profoundly unfair and politicized game.
While we were seated for dinner, the world’s largest warship anchored up outside Oslo. Crowds gathered in awe, tabloids covered it with hysterical enthusiasm, no one knew why, exactly, it was there. The USS Gerald R. Ford was headed for the Arctic for a NATO exercise that was also a theater of threat. Russia, the reckless neighbor with whom we share a border, saw it as a provocation, because it was. On its way north, the ship let out its soldiers for playtime in the capital, where they were met with people handing out free condoms, and a Norse Atlantic Airways billboard that read: “Missionary accomplished? We’ll see you in nine months, sailor.” As if to say our devotion to our towering ally is however soft and wet as our master needs it to be.
Riding back to Lillehammer on the NORLA bus, I weighed these forms of power against one another, thinking: What is literary translation if not the softest kind of soft diplomacy? And what are political and cultural interactions between states and peoples if not, in a sense, acts of translation? Cultural imperialism is never far off in these matters, but the way I saw it, the industry of literary translation was not guilty by association, despite its dubious aspects. Translation is meaning, knowledge and form moved across geographical distances, clashing with and adapting to local signifiers, newborn in new forms, like spores of mushrooms traveling on the wind.
I asked the bus driver to drop me off at the dive bar where every night of the Norwegian Literature Festival ended. People there were dazed and saturated by marathons of book events. When I left the pub, the recently superglued sole of my party shoe got hooked on the doorstep, ripping it back open. It gaped moronically. So I strolled barefoot back up Lillehammer’s makeshift Mount Olympus, high heels in hand, trying to imagine how it must have felt to be in the audience at ancient Olympic Games, where big questions about the nature of war, storytelling and empire must have felt more obviously interwoven than they do to us. They hold each other so nicely, those two ancient substitutes for war: sports and literature. If power is an inevitable thing, I wish all of it looked like this. I wish all national chauvinism looked like people transporting stories from one language to another.
This essay has been updated since publication to correct the year of the Lillehammer Olympics.