Meet the Author – Athena Farrokhzad & Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl
19:30
Meet the Author
October 4. at 7:30pm. Free entrance. The program will take place in a Scandinavian languages.
Livestream
ATHENA FARROKHZAD (1983) is a Swedish poet, literary critic, translator, playwright and teacher of creative writing at Biskops-Arnö folk high school. She was born in Iran and grew up in Sweden. In 2013, Athena Farrokhzad published the collection of poems titled Vitsvit (White Blight), which has since been translated into many languages. An Icelandic translation is expected later this year. Vitsvit was even dramatized for Radioteatern as well as staged at the Unga Klara theatre in Stockholm. In Vitsvit, a family´s story is told by a choir of voices: the daughter, mother, father, brother, uncle and grandmother all get their say, and through their voices, a story about war takes shape, how war shapes people and how they construct their own story of war. Vitsvit also deals with family relations, violence, power and mutual dependence. The book was nominated for the 2013 August Prize in the category Fiction and in the same year, Athena Farrokhzad was awarded the Karin Boye Literary Prize. Farrokhzad has published several poetry anthologies, of which the latest is a collaboration with Romanian poet Svetlana Cârstean. The book is titled Trado and will even be published in Romania.
EIRÍKUR ÖRN NORÐDAHL (1978) is an Icelandic writer, poet and translator. He published his first collection of poems Heilagt stríð: runnið undan rifjum drykkjumanna in 2001. Since then, he has published several collections of poems and four novels, including Eitur fyrir byrjendur from 2009 and Illska from 2012. Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl was awarded the Icelandic Literary Prize for Illska in 2012, which was also nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize in the same year. The book has been described as a mixture of a European historical novel and an Icelandic contemporary novel, interlarded with poetry, non-fiction, philosophy, history and political theory. Eiríkur Örn burst on the international scene with his experimental poetry and his renowned spoken word readings and has received, among other things, an Honorable Mention at the Zebra Poetry Film Festival Berlin.
