Join Gyldendal prize-winning author Hanne Ørstavik and Hannah Trevarthen at Juno Books for the Sheffield launch of Ørstavik’s new novel, Stay with Me, translated from Norwegian by Martin Aitken
For Hanne Ørstavik’s unnamed narrator, fear is a second skin. She recalls Pappa running with an axe, furious and drunk on homemade vodka — he claims he only meant the ax as a gavel, a “prop,” even so it took a sedative and several men to bring him to the snow-covered ground. Our narrator, a successful writer, is fifty-three, her father a frail twig, but the fear from her past still envelopes her. In urgent prose, the contours of her life emerge: a twelve-year marriage, the death of her lover L, her troubled relationship with M — 15 years her junior and vexed with an all-too-familiar rage. We waver between our narrator’s life and the life of Judith, the protagonist of her nascent novel. Pulled between worlds and syntax she writes on, dashing her words as she pens them.
What results is the recursive voice of someone gasping for breath: Who are Pappa, M, without their rage? Who am I, without my fear? Who am I reaching for, when I reach for Judith? With Martin Aikten’s careful translation, Hanne Ørstavik unravels the binds that fasten us to those we love — why we return despite immeasurable pain, and why we finally, justly, leave.
The book reached us all. We were all seized by the acute questions the text posed. The existential questions, which no one living here and now can evade.
— Gyldendal Prize jury
“Writing is a process of accessing a truth that only the writing can realize. And to get to that place, everything can be thrown in –– imagination and lived life –– it is the writing that renders it real –– and the reality of the novel, its truth, becomes deeply transformative to me.” — Hanne Ørstavik
Hanne Ørstavik is one of the most remarkable and admired authors in Norwegian contemporary literature. Her novel Love was voted one of Norway’s Top Ten books of the last twenty-five years. Her penultimate novel Ti Amo was published in English by And Other Stories in 2022. Stay with Me is her latest and sixteenth novel.
Hannah Trevarthen is the Director of Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature.