The Danish writer Jonas Eika, winner of the Nordic Council Literature Prize2019, in conversation with the Icelandic filmmaker Ísold Uggadóttir. The conversation moderated by writer Hanne Viemose will be in English.
Jonas Eika’s book Efter solen / After the Sun and Isold Uggadóttir‘s award-winning film work; Andið Eðlligen / And Breathe Normally are both works of art that address current political issues in the world: In the film, it is asylum policy and refugees, while in the book it is a more abstract, yet recognizably unstable world.
Jonas Eika and Ísold Uggadóttir will meet in conversation about how they have worked on these issues and what considerations they have made along the way in relation to their artistic expression, both of which work with a social-realistic reality.
After the Sun is a bookmarking the global crisis. Exploitation and inequality, despairing conditions and violent, dark experiences are an important part of its substance. Yet one feels a sense of hope when it comes to the possibility of change. That another world is actually possible and that this world may already be here but requires being called alive and unfolded. If it is true that language is fossil poetry, then After the Sun initiates an intense and sustainable extraction of the fuel of the language, which in itself is breathtaking. But the book also sets a new, affirmative tone in the literature dealing with the issues that no one can avoid: the effects of global inequality, global warming and all the other crises that our world is full of.
After the sun has received Danish Fiction Writers’ Prize Den svære Toer, Montana’s Literature Prize and the Michael Strunge Prize.
The Nordic Council Literature Prize
The jury’s reasoning: ”The recipient of the Nordic Council Literature Prize 2019 is a very young writer whose short story collection After the Sun has surprised and enthralled the jury with its global perspective, its sensual and imaginative language, and its ability to speak into contemporary political challenges without way feels directed to a certain place. Jonas Eika writes about a reality that is recognizable, whether we are in Copenhagen, Mexico or Nevada – among financial speculators, homeless boys or people who believe in aliens. But there is poetic magic in the air. Reality opens up to other possibilities, other dimensions. There is something wonderful and hopeful in it that exactly reminds us why literature can do more than mirror what we already know.”