Virtual Memories: Linn Ullmann pt. 2 – Persona
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“Every time you start with a blank page, and nothing is a given. Knowing more just makes you less confident. A certain lack of confidence is good in writing, because you want to go places where you’re not on safe ground.”
Listen in to part 2 of my conversation with Linn Ullmann about her new novel, The Cold Song, from Other Press
! (Part 1 is over here.) We talk about her writing habits and practices, her favorite Scandinavian authors, how she tweaked the book for its translation into English, and how August Strindberg got revenge on people. We also talk about the lengths she and her husband go to in order to get undisturbed writing time, when she realized she wasn’t going to become a ballerina, and how to convey the Norwegian concept of skavank to some zhlub from New Jersey.
“You have to do bad writing before it gets to good writing.”
Bonus: I let Linn interview me, and boy does THAT go off the rails! Give it a listen!
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About our Guest
Linn Ullmann is a literary critic and the author of five novels: Before You Sleep
(1998), Stella Descending
(2001), Grace
(2002), A Blessed Child
(2005), and The Cold Song (2011). Grace won The Reader’s Prize in Norway and was named one of the top ten novels that year by the Weekendavisen newspaper in Denmark. In 2007, Grace was longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in the UK. A Blessed Child was shortlisted for the Brage Prize in Norway. In 2007, Ms. Ullmann was awarded the Amalie Skram Award for her literary work, and she received Gullpennen (the Golden Pen) for her journalism in Norway’s leading morning newspaper Aftenposten. In 2008, A Blessed Child was named Best Translated novel in the British newspaper The Independent, and in 2009 the novel was longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in the UK. Linn Ullmann’s novels are published throughout Europe and the U.S. and are translated into 30 languages. The Cold Song was recently published in the U.S. by Other Press. Ms. Ullmann lives in Oslo with her husband Niels Fredrik Dahl, a novelist, playwright and poet. She has two children, Hanna and Halfdan, and two stepchildren, Dagny and Kasper. She also has a dog named Charlie.
Credits: This episode’s music is Double Feature by Camera Obscura. The conversation was recorded in the business center of an undisclosed hotel on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones
, feeding into a Zoom H4n recorder
. The intro and outro were recorded on Blue Yeti USB Microphone
. Processing was done in Audacity and Garage Band. Photo of Ms. Ullmann by Morgan Norman.
