The stage at The Garage is empty but for a teal-coloured yoga ball against the back wall. As the light fades we hear Greta Thunberg’s famous speech to the House of Commons (‘Now we probably don’t even have a future any more’) followed by the sound of a muffled heartbeat. A voice carries through the…
Reportedly, one in ten are afraid of flying, which means that right now thousands of people are gripping the armrests of their plane-seats in prolonged, mid-air panic. As someone who has suffered from aviophobia for years, I bring you eight tips on how to cope with your fear of flying: Take your time: The airport…
On May 18th, the author W. G. ‘Max’ Sebald would have turned 75. Several events commemorating the author will take place throughout the last spring month, and this week saw the opening of two separate exhibitions on Sebald, as well as two symposiums on his work organised by UEA’s British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT),…
Over the past year, when Britain has been continually debating when and how to leave the European Union, there has been a surge in the sale of translated fiction in the UK. According to figures commissioned by the Man Booker International from Nielsen Book, UK sales of translated fiction grew by 5.5 percent only last…
It felt odd to watch a farcical comedy set on a luxury ocean liner just days after the dramatic evacuation of the passengers on Viking Sky, the cruise ship that got into trouble outside the western Norwegian coast on March 23. As the comedic drama unfolded onstage at the Norwich Theatre Royal, passengers had to cling…
Rachel Cusk, slight with a soft brown fringe and grey trainers, looks calmly out on the audience when greeted with applause. She speaks with deliberation in a low voice, as though confident that whatever she puts forward will be interesting to her listeners. She is right. Philip Langeskov opens by talking about the vicious reception Cusk’s memoir…
Canadian-born writer Rachel Cusk’s controversial memoirs about motherhood and divorce, together with the recent Outline-trilogy, have made it so that writers and critics often couples her name with the term autofiction. Although she herself does not use that term to describe her body of work, it is undoubtedly part of the recent surge of literature…
In the eighth and ninth centuries, the area of East Anglia was particularly vulnerable to invasion from Vikings sailing across the North Sea. With fertile land conveniently located facing the southern part of Scandinavia, the invasion of East Anglia and Northumbria (what is now northern England and south-eastern Scotland) by the Great Heathen Army in…
In a 2014 interview with Vogue, the Norwegian writer and journalist Linn Ullmann was asked what she was currently working on. ‘I am writing a memoir’, she replied, ‘or at least I thought it was a memoir. But since my memory is both very vivid and not entirely reliable, it could just as well be…
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