With his seventh novel, Collapse, Édouard Louis has now completed his celebrated family saga about his own upbringing and family.

Louis writes ruthlessly and skillfully about subjects such as class distinctions, violence, racism, gender, and political power and powerlessness, and his writing has become a point of reference and inspiration for writers across the world. Through the seven novels making up his family saga, he portrays the social structures that are the basis for the violence he experienced as a child, as well as his ambivalence towards his own family and the wider working class. However, he is most ruthless when exposing his own life and flaws.

Louis has two new novels out this year: Collapse and Monique Escapes. In Collapse, Louis explores his older brother’s decline, one he both feared and came to for safety, and who died, aged 38, after a life of alcoholism, poverty, neglect and self-inflicted violence.

In Monique Escapes, he portrays his mother’s escape from yet another destructive and violent relationship, marked by alcohol and degrading treatment. The novel depicts her struggle to find a way out when she has neither money, an education certificate nor a driver’s license.

In both novels, Louis explores how social and economic structures shapes and limits people’s possibilities to create a free life. “The most political thing I do, is portray that which is invisible,” Louis said last time he visited the House of Literature. He returned now to talk about completing his family saga, his literary ruthlessness and the way ahead. He was joined by writer colleague and critic Erlend Loe, who has followed Louis’s body of work closely.

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En octobre 2022, Annie Ernaux a reçu le prix Nobel de littérature, en tant que première femme française, « pour le courage et l'acuité clinique avec lesquels elle découvre les racines, les étrangetés et les contraintes collectives de la mémoire personnelle ». Avec des livres comme Les Années, Une femme et L'Événement, qui font tomber les barrières entre autobiographie, fiction et sociologie, Ernaux a gagné un large lectorat dans le monde entier, et a agrandi ce qui est considéré comme un langage littéraire. D'une écriture économique et non sentimentale, elle fait émerger des expériences collectives à travers des histoires personnelles, et montre comment la classe, le genre et les structures sociales nous façonnent, et comment des événements apparemment mineurs peuvent changer toute une vie.

Les livres d'Ernaux sont à la fois une archéologie personnelle et une analyse sociologique, et montrent comment ce qui est profondément personnel, aussi toujours est politique. La double conscience de classe occupe une place centrale dans son expérience et son œuvre. Elle s'est décrite comme une « émigrante de classe » ou une « transfuge de classe », quelqu'un qui a quitté le monde de la classe ouvrière sans pour autant trouver complètement sa place dans la bourgeoisie.

Cet automne, Ernaux a deux nouvelles publications en norvégien, toutes deux traduites par Henninge Margrethe Solberg. L'Autre fille est écrite comme une lettre à la sœur qu'elle n'a jamais rencontrée, un texte sur le manque, la culpabilité et comment le silence familial peut être aussi formateur que ce qui est effectivement dit. Dans Les Armoires vides, le premier roman d'Ernaux de 1974, s'établit la voix implacable et profondément existentielle qui devait marquer toute son œuvre. Y est racontée l'histoire d'une jeune femme qui tente de surmonter l'expérience d'un avortement illégal, et qui doit démêler le passé pour comprendre comment son éducation a façonné son identité.

De retour à la Maison de littérature, Ernaux a rencontré Kjerstin Aukrust, maître de conférences en littérature française à l’Université d’Oslo, pour une conversation sur la classe, le travail de mémoire et sur comment l'écriture peut devenir une forme d'archéologie de sa propre vie.

La conversation a eu lieu dans la Salle des fêtes de l'Université d’Oslo.

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«The moral component of history, the most necessary component, is simply a single questions, asked over and over again: When it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power?» One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad

The lack of a response from the West to Israel’s brutal war in Gaza reveals how the West values certain lives more than others, according to author and journalist Omar El Akkad. For El Akkad, born in Egypt and raised in Qatar, the West long represented the polar opposite to everything he hated about the Middle East: The corruption, the censorship, the surveillance, the exaltation of corrupt leaders.

As a teenager, El Akkad moved with his family to North America, and became a part of the liberal Western world order. Despite a few reservations, he kept his faith in the West as a region committed to human rights, freedom, justice and respect for the law. Until October 8th, 2023, when Israel launched their latest war against Gaza.

The essay collection One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a reckoning with what El Akkad considers to be the West’s double standards. He exposes rhetoric and euphemisms that allow murder on innocent civilians, that necessitates the new acronym WCNSF (wounded child, no surviving family), and shows how the Gaza war is part of a longer history of us versus them.

Omar El Akkad is an award-winning author and journalist of many years. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is his first non-fiction book, it has garnered broad attention and is under translation into a number of languages.

At the House of Literature, El Akkad was joined by author and journalist Yohan Shanmugaratnam for a conversation about anger, the suffering in Gaza and Western double standards.

The event was supported by NORAD.

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