Gunnhild Øyehaug is an award-winning Norwegian poet, essayist, and fiction writer. She was co-editor of the literary journal Vagant and Kraftsentrum and currently teaches creative writing.
Profile in The New Yorker
NOVEL
Knots: Stories, translated by Kari Dickson (FSG, 2017).
“First published in Norway in 2004, Knots is Gunnhild Øyehaug’s radical collection of short stories that range from the surreal to the oddly mundane, and prod the discomforts of mental, sexual, and familial bonds.
In both precise short-shorts and ruminative longer tales, Øyehaug meanders through the tangled, jinxed, and unavoidable conflicts of love and desire. From young Rimbaud’s thwarted passions to the scandalous disappearance of an entire family, these stories do the chilling work of tracing the outlines of what could have been in both the quietly morbid and the delightfully comical. A young man is born with an uncuttable umbilical cord and spends his life physically tethered to his mother; a tipsy uncle makes an uncomfortable toast with unforeseeable repercussions; and a dissatisfied deer yearns to be seen. As one character reflects, “You never know how things might turn out, you never know how anything will turn out, tomorrow the walls might fall down, the room disappear.”
Cleverly balancing the sensuous, the surreal, and the comical, Øyehaug achieves a playful familiarity with the absurd that never overreaches the needs of her stories. Full of characters who can’t help tying knots in themselves and each other, these tales make the world just a little more strange, and introduce a major international voice of searing vision, grace, and humor.”
SHORT STORIES/EXCERPTS
“Same Time, Another Planet,” translated by Lydia Davis (The Paris Review, 2015).
“Light,” translated by Kerri Pierce (Words Without Borders, 2017).
Excerpt from Knots, translated by Kari Dickson (FSG, 2017).
