A fun one from Olav H. Hauge i think about a lot: BERTOLT BRECHT A versatile fellow: playwright, actor, poet His verse was handy to step into, it stood on the door-step like a pair of wooden clogs.

I love the last three lines of the poem Everyday from 1966's Drops in the East Wind (trans. Robin Fulton)

five by five

I interviewed Jenna Grace Sciuto about her book "Intersecting Worlds: Colonial Liminality in US Southern and Icelandic Literatures" We touch on Faulkner, Laxness, Svava Jakobsdóttir, Skriðuklaustur, McCullers & much more. lonningspils.ca/2026/02/15/i...

great write up from the best site. i'm still grappling with where it stands in his oeuvre... outside of his Big 3 great works, this may be my favourite so far.

New on the website. Noah Vølund Fechter reviews "they" by Helle Helle (trans. Martin Aitken). @ndbooks.bsky.social lonningspils.ca/2026/02/10/t...

Forthcoming from New Directions in October: my translation of LONDON by Louis-Ferdinand Céline! Probably the most difficult book of all the 50+ books I've translated, for many reasons...

french lit pickups from a used bookstore visit

Poesia forever. 🇫🇮🇫🇮🇫🇮

finally making a dent in the new tove ditlevsen

Auden... in Iceland?

this piece by anne meredith barry feels exactly halfway between nikolai astrup & tove jansson, so ya i do love it so so much

I love reading Tomas Tranströmer poems.

I wrote about one of the best novels I encoutered last year. One Thousand & One by Kari Hukkila. (Trans. David Hackston). An essayistic novel with truly unique form. It is part wittgenstein biography, part history of natural disasters & part tempestuous love story. lonningspils.ca/2026/01/03/o...

In a big step for the website, we sent Penelope Dieppa to the New York launch of The School Of Night, where Karl Ove Knausgaard was in conversation with Patricia Lockwood. An insightful #KnausgaardUpdate. lonningspils.ca/2026/01/15/o...

New on Lønningspils today. I interviewed @mayaweeks.bsky.social about translating the author's note for Tove Jansson's "Sun City", studying plastic pollution in Sweden from a feminist environmental justice perspective, making ambient records & so much more. lonningspils.ca/2026/01/09/i...

fish by nevan hinks

I just finished Solvej Balle's 1993 book "Ifølge loven // According To The Law", truly blown away. It really mogs OTCOF and hope to see more of their work in translation in the near future.

three paintings by mamma andersson

Double Bubble, Double Tove Jansson over the past few days. My first encounter with their work. Big preference for Sun City.

Intersecting Worlds: Colonial Liminality from the US South to Iceland with Dr. Sciuto (#28, English and Icelandic) icelandchicago.org/2024/12/27/i...

11. Nothing Grows by Moonlight by Torborg Nedreaas (tr. Bibbi Lee). One woman’s immersive monologue recounting the wounding love affair that has shaped her life brims with arresting philosophical aperçus, freighted by a keen sensitivity to the injustices of capitalist existence.

A.V. Marraccini is a writer, based in New York who has had their essay "Mutta on toisia geometrioita" translated & published in Finland, by the press Poesia. I chatted with A.V. & Poesia's Erkka Filander (who is a Runeberg prize nominated poet himself). lonningspils.ca/2025/12/18/i...

Per Esben Svelstad holds a Ph.D. on the Norwegian writer Åsmund Sveen. He works in the topics of ecocriticism, queer reading, literary education and more. I interviewed him about his 2024 book "Same-Sex Desire and the Environment in Norwegian Literature, 1908–1979" lonningspils.ca/2025/12/18/i...

some recent nordic reads

quietly put some new stuff on the website: an interview with edy poppy, who just released their new book with dalkey / deep vellum. + reviews of both their new book coming. apart. & their debut, anatomy. monotony. lonningspils.ca