The Dark Blue Winter Overcoat and Other Stories from the North

Author Biographies

Originally from Greenland, NAJA MARIE AIDT is a Danish poet and author with twenty-seven works in various genres to her name. She has received numerous honours, including the Danish Critics’ Prize and the Nordic nations’ most prestigious literary prize, the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize, in 2008 for Baboon, and her work has been translated into ten languages. Her work has also been anthologized in the Best European Fiction series and has appeared in leading American journals. Baboon was published in the USA by Two Lines Press in 2014. Denise Newman won the PEN Translation Prize for her translation of Baboon in 2015. Naja Marie Aidt’s first novel, Rock, Paper, Scissors, was published in August 2015 by Open Letter Books. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

KJELL ASKILDSEN (born 1929 in Mandal, Norway) is one of the great Norwegian writers of the post-war era and a major figure in contemporary Scandinavian literature. Since his debut in 1953 he has published seven acclaimed short-story collections, as well as five novels. His latest book, the short-story collection The Cost of Friendship, was published in 2015. Askildsen has won the Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize, the national Brage Prize and the Norwegian Critics’ Prize twice. His short stories have been translated into twenty-nine languages.

JOHAN BARGUM (born in 1943 in Helsinki, Finland) is a writer and director. He writes Swedish, Finland’s second official language and had his first book, a collection of short stories (Swartvitt, “Black and white”) published in 1965. He has mostly written short stories, but has also published novels and plays, some thirty works altogether. Films and television plays based on his work have been produced in Finland and Sweden, and his prose has been translated into several West and East European languages. His play Are There Tigers in the Congo? has been translated into more than twenty languages. Bargum has received many awards, among them the Pro Finlandia medal in 1996 and has been active in the cultural field as chairman of several organizations including the Finland-Swedish Authors Union. He is married, with two daughters and four grandchildren.

GUÐBERGUR BERGSSON (born in 1932 in Grindavik, Iceland) published his modernist novel Tómas Jónsson metsölubók in 1966 (“Tómas Jónsson Bestseller”), a cultural breakthrough in Icelandic literature. His novel Svanurinn (1991) (The Swan) secured his position as a major European novelist. Bergsson’s books have been translated into many languages. He is also a prolific translator of world literature and has enriched Icelandic literature and culture with timeless masterpieces by Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American writers, including Cervantes’s Don Quixote. He has been the recipient of several major prizes, including the Nordic Prize of the Swedish Academy in 2004. In 2010, he was awarded the Spanish Royal Cross (Orden de Merito civil).

HASSAN BLASIM was born in Baghdad in 1973, where he studied at the city’s Academy of Cinematic Arts. In 1998, he was advised to leave Baghdad, as his documentary critiques of life under Saddam Hussein had put him at risk. He fled to Sulaymaniya (Iraqi Kurdistan), where he continued to make films, including the feature-length drama Wounded Camera, under the Kurdish pseudonym “Ouazad Osman”. In 2004, after years of travelling illegally through Europe as a refugee, he finally settled in Finland. His first story to appear in print was for Comma’s anthology Madinah (2008), edited by Joumana Haddad, which was followed by two commissioned collections, The Madman of Freedom Square (2009) and The Iraqi Christ (2013)—all translated into English by Jonathan Wright. The latter collection won the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and Hassan’s stories have now been published in over twenty languages.

PER OLOV ENQUIST was born in 1934 in a small village in the northern part of Sweden. He is one of the most celebrated authors in Scandinavia, both as a novelist and a playwright. His novels have been translated into more than forty languages, and he is one of the most performed Scandinavian playwrights. Enquist is one of only two writers ever to have twice received the August Prize for fiction, the most prestigious Swedish literary prize: in 1999 with the novel The Visit of the Royal Physician, and in 2008 with his memoir novel The Wandering Pine.

FRODE GRYTTEN (born in 1960) made his debut in 1984 with the poetry collection Start. Since then he has written novels, short stories, poems and children’s books. Songs of the Beehive won Norway’s national book award, the Brage Prize, and was shortlisted for the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize. His only thriller, Floating Bear (2005), won the prestigious Riverton Prize. Grytten’s latest book, the short-story collection Men No One Needs, was published in 2016.

CARL JÓHAN JENSEN (born in Tórshavn in 1957) is one of the most original and provocative writers on the Faroese literary scene today. Poet and novelist Jensen is also a prominent figure in the public debate on culture and politics in the Faroe Islands. Since the early 1980s, he has produced seven volumes of poetry, four novels and a collection of essays, and he is a regular reviewer of the Faroese arts. He has twice been awarded the Faroese M.A. Jacobsen Literature Prize, and nominated five times for the prestigious Nordic Council’s Literature Prize. His work has appeared in literary journals and anthologies in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany and the USA. Jensen’s celebrated novel Ó-: søgur um djevulskap (2005) (working title in English: “Un-: Tales of Devilry”) was published in Norwegian translation in 2010 and in Icelandic in 2013. He is currently completing his fifth novel, which is expected to be published in early 2018.

LINDA BOS TRÖM KNAUSGAARD (born 1972) is a Swedish poet and author, as well as a producer of documentaries for Swedish radio. In 1998 she made her debut with a collection of poetry entitled Gör mig behaglig för såret, and in 2011 she returned with Grand Mal, a critically acclaimed collection of short stories. Her first novel, Helioskatastrofen, published in English by World Editions as The Helios Disaster (2013), proved to be her international breakthrough. Some of her awards and nominations include: winner of the Mare Kandre Prize 2013; nominated for Svenska Dagbladets Literary Prize in 2016, for the prestigious August Prize in 2016, and for the International Dublin Literary Award 2016 for Helioskatastrofen.

NIVIAQ KORNELIUSSEN (born in 1990) grew up in Nanortalik, a small town in Southern Greenland. She went to California in 2007 as an exchange student, obtained Greenland’s equivalent of GCSEs in Nuuk and moved to Denmark to study psychology. Because of the great success of her debut novel HOMO sapienne in 2014, she is now back in Nuuk writing and working on different cultural projects.

ROSA LIKSOM (born 1958 in Lapland, Finland) is a prize-winning writer and two-time candidate for the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize. Her books have been translated into eighteen languages. She is also a renowned painter and film-maker. She is an expert on people who live in unconventional circumstances, on the borders of cultures. With “Passing Things” (2014), Rosa Liksom returns to very short prose, a genre she pioneered and a medium in which she is still an undisputed master.

ULLA-LENA LUNDBERG is an acclaimed and prize-winning Swedish-Finnish novelist and ethnologist. She was born in 1947 on Kökar in the autonomous Åland Islands, and drew on her upbringing there in Ice, her recent and most well-known novel. Ice won the prestigious Finlandia Prize in 2012 and was nominated for the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize. It is published in the UK by Sort of Books in a translation by Thomas Teal. Ulla-Lena Lundberg is the author of more than twenty works of fiction and non-fiction. She has travelled extensively, and has lived and worked in the USA, the UK, Japan, Africa and Siberia. She currently lives in Mariehamn, the only town in Åland. Her face has recently appeared on an Åland island stamp.

SÓLRÚN MICHELSEN (born 1948) made her debut in 1994 with a short-story collection for children, Argjafrensar, and has since published several books for children as well as poetry and other short-story collections. She was awarded the Faroese Children’s Literature Award in 2002. In 2004 she published her first novel for adults, Tema við slankum, for which she was awarded the Faroese M.A. Jacobsen Literature Prize; it has been published in Denmark, Norway and Germany. Her latest novel, Hinumegin er mars, from 2013, is a gripping novel about a woman caring for her elderly mother who has dementia. The novel was nominated for the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize in 2015 and was published in Denmark in February 2017.

MADAME NIELSEN is a Danish novelist, artist, performer, stage director and world history enactor; she is also a composer and chanteuse. She is the author of numerous literary works, including her novel trilogy, The Suicide Mission (2005), The Sovereign (2008), Fall of the Great Satan (2012), and most recently The Endless Summer (2014), the “Bildungsroman” The Invasion (2016) and The Supreme Being (2017). Her work has been translated into nine languages and has received several literary prizes. The autobiographical novel My Encounters with the Great Authors of Our Nation was published in 2013 under the name Claus Beck-Nielsen and was nominated for the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize in 2014.

DORTHE NORS was born in 1970 and is one of the most original voices in contemporary Danish literature. She holds a degree in literature and art history from Aarhus University and has published four novels so far, in addition to a short-story collection, Karate Chop, and a novella, Minna Needs Rehearsal Space. Nors’ short stories have appeared in numerous publications, including Harper’s Magazine and the Boston Review, and she is the first Danish writer ever to have a story published in the New Yorker. In 2014, Karate Chop won the prestigious P.O. Enquist Literary Prize. Karate Chop and Minna Needs Rehearsal Space are both published by Pushkin Press.

KRISTÍN ÓMARSDÓTTIR was born in Reykjavík in 1962. Her debut work in 1987 was a play; and in the same year her first book of poetry was published. She has written novels, poems, short stories and plays, and in 2009 she won the literary prize Fjöruverðlaunin for her book of poetry Sjáðu fegurð þína. She received the “Griman”, the Icelandic prize for best playwright of the year for her play Segðu mér allt in 2005. Three of her novels have been nominated for the Íslensku bókmenntaverðlaunin prize, and one, Elskan mín ég dey (1997), was nominated for the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize. Her work has been published in Denmark, Sweden, the USA, France and the UK. She lives in Reykjavík.

SIGBJØRN SKÅDEN (born 1976) is a Saami-Norwegian writer from Skånland in North Norway. He writes in both Saami and Norwegian and made his debut in 2004 with the poetry collection Skuovvadeddjiid gonagas (The King of Shoemakers) which was nominated for the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize. He has since published a second collection of poetry, a children’s book and two novels, in addition to numerous works written for the stage or installation art projects. He was awarded the Young Artist of the Year Award at indigenous art festival Riddu Riđđu, has been the prologue writer for the Arctic Arts Festival and a keynote speaker at the indigenous forum of the Medellín Poetry Festival, Colombia. His latest book, the novel Våke over dem som sover (Watch over Those Who Sleep), was nominated for the Norwegian Broadaster’s Listeners’ Award and received the Havmann Award for best book by a North Norwegian writer.

SØRINES TEENHOLDT was born in 1986 and grew up in Paamiut, Greenland. She had a rather difficult childhood, which continues to influence her writing today. In 2012 she won a short-story competition that made her want to keep writing, and in 2015 her short-story collection Zombieland was published. She now lives in Nuuk with her daughter; she is engaged in many cultural projects and continues to write.