Niviaq Korneliussen and Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir will talk together about their authorships. The two authors have several overlapping interests that they will unfold. Niviaq’s latest novel, BLOMSTERDALEN (the flower valley), deals with suicide, sex, and relationships. She first experienced suicide when she was thirteen. She herself will be buried between the high mountains in Tasiilaq, where the nameless graves in the cemetery in BLOMSTERDALEN are covered with blue, red and pink plastic flowers, lying in the pure snow seen on the front of the book.
The collective, the community around the ‘suicide culture’ in Greenland is touched upon in BLOMSTERDALEN in the most sensitive way for a long time.
BLOMSTERDALEN is a story without compromise and a black humorous novel about love, friendship, and grief – and about being wrong in a society where no one talks about the dead.
Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir (born 1958) award-winning book, AR, also deals with suicide, but with a completely different approach, as a ‘man’s suffering’ in connection with the world. Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir is a well-established Icelandic author and art historian. Ólafsdóttir’s latest novel Dýralif was published in 2020. Her novel Ór won the Nordic Council Literature Prize 2018. In 2019, the French translation of her novel Miss Island received the Prix Médicis étranger.
Niviaq Korneliussen (born 1990) is a Greenlandic author, known for his pioneering novels. Her latest novel BLOMSTERDALEN was published in 2020. Korneliussen made her debut in 2014 with her novel HOMO sapienne. The novel, which depicts the lives of LGTBQ + people in Greenland, was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize 2015. Niviaq Korneliussen is nominated for the Nordic Council Literaturprize 2021 for her novel BLOMSTERDALEN.
Moderator, Sofie Hermansen Eriksdatter, Head of Secretariat, The Nordic Council Literature Prizes.