Kierkegaard, the Uncanny and Nordic Noir

Unsettling Copenhagen in Philosophical writing and contemporary drama

5 May 2013 marks the bicentenary of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s birth. The aim of this symposium is to explore Kierkegaard’s writing on Copenhagen in relation to the theme of the uncanny. This will be done by superimposing the Copenhagen found in Kierkegaard’s writings with a contemporary and notoriously unsettling representation of this city: the TV-drama The Killing.

Join the PUBLIC SYMPOSIUM on 17 May, 2013, 10-5 PM. UCL, Pearson Building (North East Entrance) G22 LT (map)

The event is free but please register your participation here as seats are limited. For further information and the programme visit the website: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/scandinavian-studies/kierkegaard.

The UKs first ever show celebrating 
Scandinavian crime & thriller fiction & film

A quick glance at the best-seller lists for novels and DVD box sets and it is obvious that Scandinavian crime fiction and drama have become a cultural phenomenon here in the UK. 

Kick-started by the novel ‘The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo’ and the subsequent films, Scandinavian crime drama, or ‘Nordic Noir’ has gone from strength to strength with the screen adaptations of Henning Mankell’s ‘Wallander’ followed by the original Danish police procedural drama ‘The Killing’ which won over the hearts and minds of the UK media and public making Sarah Lund (and that jumper) a household name.

The UK’s love affair with these compelling and atmospheric dramas from our Northern European cousins shows no sign of abating, demonstrated by the success of BBC4’s most recent acquisition ‘Arne Dahl’ and the fervent anticipation for the third series of ‘Borgen’.

The Nordicana Show is a unique event, which will bring the enthusiastic and dedicated fans of Nordic Noir’s superlative TV shows, films and crime novels together for a 2-day celebration in association with Arrow Films’ Nordic Noir label the leading UK distributor of Nordic Noir on DVD and Blu-ray, and the global literary network English Pen.

The Nordicana Show will play host to the stars of the hugely popular BBC Four TV series’ and best-selling authors with exclusive premieres, panel discussions, signings, retail stands for books, DVD and  Blu-ray, food and drink and much more. The setting for this event is The Farmiloe Building in Clerkenwell, an elegant former Victorian glassworks, which will provide a striking backdrop. 

 15^th - 16^th June 2013
The Farmiloe Building – 34-35 St. John Street, London, EC1

http://nordicnoir.tv/nordicana

Press information: Please contact Lisa Richards – lisa@nordicana.co.uk Tel: 07798 876 352

Event information: Please contact Joe Pidgeon – joe@happeningevents.co.uk Tel: 07557 375 500

Conference: Crime Fiction 2013

Nordic Noir Book Club is considering sending a team of investigators to Leeds in September, will you be there?

Second call for papers:

The University of Leeds’ Faculty of Arts and the Crime Studies Network are pleased to invite you to the ‘Retold, Resold, Transformed: Crime Fiction in the Modern Era’ cross-disciplinary conference to take place at Leeds on the 17th and 18th of September 2013. See the conference website http://www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/info/125158/crimefiction2013 for the conference abstract, speakers and call for papers.

In recent decades crime fiction has enjoyed a creative boom. Although, as Alison Young argues in her book Imagining Crime (1996), crime stories remain strongly identified with specific locations, the genre has acquired a global reach, illuminating different corners of the world – from the downtown precincts of Baltimore to the South African peninsula to bleak Danish skies – for the delectation of international audiences. The recent fashion for nordic noir has highlighted the process by which the crime story may be franchised, as it is transposed from one culture to another. Crime fiction has thus become a vehicle for cultural exchange in the broadest of senses; not only does it move with apparent ease from one country to the next, and in and out of different languages, but it is also reproduced through various cultural media. But what is involved in these processes of transference? Do stories lose or gain value? Or are they transformed into something else altogether? How does the crime story that originates in a specific society or culture come to articulate aspects of very different societies and cultures? And what are the repercussions of this cultural permeability?

Fans of Nordic Noir will be pleased to learn that Barry Forshaw’s most recent book on the phenomenon has now been published.

A compact and authoritative guide to the phenomenally popular genre. The information-packed study examines and celebrates books, films and TV adaptations, from Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s highly influential Martin Beck series through Henning Mankell’s Wallander (subject of three separate TV series) to Stieg Larsson’s groundbreaking The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, cult TV hits such as the Danish The Killing, The Bridge and the political thriller Borgen, up to the hugely successful books and films of the current king of the field, Norway’s Jo Nesbo.

This and Barry’s previous book, Death in a Cold Climate, have received excellent reviews. The Nordic Noir blog has published an informative double-review.

 

Nordic Noir. The POcket Essential Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction, FIlm & TV is also available for kindle at Amazon.

Retold, Resold, Transformed: Crime Fiction in the Modern Era

The University of Leeds’ Faculty of Arts and the Crime Studies Network are pleased to invite you to the ‘Retold, Resold, Transformed: Crime Fiction in the Modern Era’ cross-disciplinary conference to take place at Leeds on the 17th and 18th of September 2013.

See the conference website http://www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/info/125158/crimefiction2013/1964/about/2 for the conference abstract, speakers and call for papers.

 

Kind Regards,

The Conference Organisers:

Dr Christiana Gregoriou, Prof. David Platten, and Dr Gigliola Sulis

Norwegian Nordic Noir with Staalesen and Enger on 23. May

Details have been published about the next Nordic Noir Book Club event on 23. May 2012 in London featuring Norwegian authors Gunnar Staalesen and Thomas Enger and Professor Hans Skei.

Visit http://scancrime.wordpress.com/paaskekrim/ for more information.

 

Elettra Carbone (UCL Scandinavian Studies) introduces the tradition of Norwegian Easter Crime fiction (Påskekrim) and the 23. May 2012 Nordic Noir Book Club event in London featuring Gunnar Staalesen and Thomas Enger.

 

Påskekrim -Norwegian Crime Event 23. May 2012, Horse Hospital, London

We are pleased to announce our next Nordic Noir Book Club event in London, which is all about Norwegian Crime Fiction (or påskekrim), to take place on 23 May 2012, including authors Gunnar Staalesen and Thomas Enger, and Norwegian crime fiction expert Professor Hans Skei.

More information – including booking details – will follow in due course, but for the time being please have a look at our website for more details – http://www.ucl.ac.uk/nordicnoir – and don’t forget our facebook and twitter sites!

Happy Easter / God Påske!
The Nordic Noir team

The Killing Book Launch at Crimefest in Bristol

The International Crime Fiction Convention, Crimefest (Bristol, 24-27 May 2012) will feature the launch of the book version of The Killing in the presence of the author, David Hewson, and members of the cast. I don’t know of other crime fictions which have had quite the journey of Forbrydelsen/The Killing: originally a Danish TV-drama, which was subsequently shown in many countries sometimes dubbed or subtitled as in Britain; it was then remade into an American TV-series set in Seattle and not in Copenhagen, and now made into an English language book without a Danish original. I should be interested to learn who would wish to read the book, and from those who actually did read  it, what it was like.

I am also thinking about the difference in versions between the Danish and the American TV-series after reading this interesting article in The New York Times: Danes Do Murder Differently.  I am certain that issues of translation, remediation, globalisation of popular culture etc. could be enlightened by these examples.

Crimefest in Bristol will also be visited by a number of well-known Nordic writers such as Yrsa Sigurdadottir, Ragnar Jonasson, Gunnar Staalesen, Åsa Larsson, Thomas Enger, and the winners of the 2011 CWA International Dagger, Anders Roslund & Börge Hellström (with Three Seconds, published by Quercus and translated from the Swedish by Kari Dickson).

 

Nordic Noir Reading Group (29. February 2012, London)

We are delighted to announce details of our first Nordic Noir Reading Group meeting, which will take place on Wednesday 29 February (from 6.00 pm) in the glamorous UCL Old Refectory where we will discuss the recently published Danish crime novel ‘The Boy in the Suitcase’ by Lene Kaaberbøl and Agnete Friis.

The discussion will be led by Dr Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen (UCL Lecturer in Scandinavian Literature) – and a glass of wine.

Among the themes we could cover are Eastern Europe in Scandinavian crime fiction, human trafficking in crime fiction, what makes this book ‘Nordic Noir’ or even a Danish or Scandinavian crime novel (apart from it being originally written in Danish, of course), self-translation (the novel was translated by Kaaberbøl herself), is there something particularly and self-consciously  Danish or Nordic about the main character in the novel – and finally, to what extend does Scandinavian crime fiction need to include social and family issues? This and much more for anyone who wish to join.

The novel should be available from most book stores in London, from Amazon etc. Elsewhere on this blog there is a link to an article about last month’s meeting with the authors at Foyles, and earlier, the Nordic Noir Book Club gave away three copies of the book in a Nordic Noir competition.

Please reserve your ticket for this event.

More information here:

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/nordicnoir/nordic-noir-events/1st-reading-group-meeting

Stockholm Noir to replace Danish Chic?

Forshaw talks to Jens Lapidus ‘one of the most striking and idiosyncratic crime writers of the new Nordic wave’, who has ‘another identity — he is a highly successful criminal lawyer, and his clientele consists of precisely those individuals who populate the teeming pages of his novels. Is this one of the reasons why the books have such an air of verisimilitude?”

http://www.welovethisbook.com/features/lapping-it