Bergen holds its first-ever international literary festival – and we’re in Norway for it!

Bryggen Hanseatic Wharf. Norway 2012 (Photo: Zygmunt Malinowski)

The Book Haven has just arrived in Norway for the first-ever Bergen Literary Festival – tired and hungry and footsore and jetlagged, but delighted with the lovely city. For example, the Bryggen Hanseatic Wharf pictured above which dates back to Middle Ages is on UNESCO world heritage list.

We just returned from listening to a riveting onstage conversation between award-winning Juan Gabriel Vásquez, author of The Sound of Things Falling (2011), about the Colombian drug wars, and now The Shape of the Ruins (2018), about two defining political murders in Bogotá’s past, and Spanish writer Edurne Portela. “Memory is a moral act,” said the Columbian author who spoke about the way we manipulate memory and history so we can go on. “History lies.”

“The truth of the novel is that there is no truth,” he said.

There will be more news on the inaugural festival, but meanwhile – Happy Valentine’s Day!

Bergen, the view from Mount Floyen (Photo: Zygmunt Malinowski)

Tags: Edurne Portela, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Zygmunt Malinowski

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2019 at 1:52 pm by Cynthia Haven and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.