We’d love for you to join us on October 19 at 1PM EST for the virtual book release of Hanne Ørstavik’s new novel The Pastor, translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken! Ørstavik will be in conversation with Rebecca Dinerstein Knight at Scandinavia House. The event will stream live on Zoom.

You can find the link to register for the event here.

With the publication of The Pastor, “Ørstavik distinguishes herself as a leading light in international literature,” Publishers Weekly wrote.

Martin Aitken’s translation of Ørstavik’s novel Love was published by Archipelago in 2018 to critical acclaim. Claire Vaye Watkins of The New York Times Book Review called it an “excellent novel of near misses . . . Ørstavik’s mastery of perspective and clean, crackling sentences prevent sentimentality or sensationalism from trailing this story of a woman and her accidentally untended child. Both of them long for love, but the desire lines of the book are beautifully crooked.”

On translating Love, Aitken wrote, “Hanne’s deceptively uncomplicated prose is an exacting task for any translator. Everything’s below the surface. There’s a lightness of touch to her sentences, and a movingly human insight that makes the writing as luminous as the snow of northern Norway where the book is set.”

Hanne Ørstavik published the novel Cut in 1994 and embarked on a career that would make her one of the most remarkable and admired authors in Norwegian contemporary literature. Her literary breakthrough came three years later with the publication of Love (Kjærlighet), which in 2006 was voted the 6th best Norwegian book of the last 25 years in a prestigious contest in Dagbladet. Since then, the author has written several acclaimed and much discussed novels and received a host of literary prizes.