Meet crime writer and glaciologist Monica Kristensen at UCL, 27 Feb at 5.30pm

Meet Monica Kristensen at the UCL Scandinavian Studies celebration of Polar Bear Day and the Nordic Arctic on Tuesday 27 February 5.30-7.00pm. Click here for more information about the day’s celebrations and reserve a seat for the evening event followed by reception. All are Welcome!

About Monica
Monica Kristensen was born in Sweden 30th June 1950, and grew up outside Oslo in Norway. She has wintered on Svalbard for a total of seven years and lived in England (Cambridge and Guildford) for twelve years. At present she lives in Cambridge with her husband, daughter and two cats.

She has several university degrees in mathematics, theoretical physics and glaciology (PhD) from the Universities of Oslo, Tromsø and Cambridge, UK. She also has a Master degree in polar administration (Cambridge University).

Dr. Kristensen has previously worked for twenty years as a climate scientist, was director of the Meteorological Institute of northern Norway for three years, director of the international scientific community of Ny-Ålesund on Svalbard for five years, and has been Secretary General for two years of the Norwegian Lifeboat Association in Norway. She is now working as an author, polar historian and independent scientist.

Dr. Kristensen has been on many expeditions, mainly to Antarctica and the Arctic. She was the first woman to lead an expedition in Antarctica, when she and three colleagues in 1986/87 walked nearly two thousand kilometers on skis and with dog teams on a combined scientific and memorial expedition in honour of the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. During her more than thirty expeditions to the Polar Regions, she has used a broad range of logistics; Hercules planes, helicopters, ships, skidoos, dog teams, skis. For a few years she owned an ice breaker (MS Aurora) and a five-cabin polar station (Bluefields) at 79 degrees south in Antarctica.

She has been coordinator and a leader of many international cooperation projects in the Arctic and Antarctic, the most recent an international study of climate-related glaciology, the Foxfonna Project on Svalbard, for four years.

Dr. Kristensen has received a number of awards and citations, among them is: Paul Harris Fellow of the Rotary Club International in 1987, an award from the International Society for Protection of Animals (1987), several literary awards, several honorary doctorates, the National Geographic Magazine and Alexander Graham Bell Society annual Citation of Merit (1987) as well as the Finn Ronne Award (Explorers Club, New York) in 1989 and an environmental reward from AFFN in 2002.

In 1989 she received the Gold (Founders) Medal of the Royal Geographical Society for her research in Antarctica.

Dr. Kristensen has chaired and has been a member of a large number of national and international committees, among them she has been member of the Svalbard Council, member of the Board of the Norwegian Space Centre, member of the WMO Working Group on Antarctic Meteorology, member of the board of the Centre for International Climate Policy Research, University of Oslo, member of the Representative’s Board, The World Wildlife Foundation, President, Explorers Club, Norway Chapter, member of the Norwegian Council for Space Research, member of the National Committee on Polar Research (Arctic and Antarctica), member of Svalbard Science Forum, chairman of the Norwegian National Council on Genetic Resources and vice chairman and member of the Board, The Fridtjof Nansen Institute. From 2012 and to the present she is chairman the Kryos Foundation that funds climate-related research in the Arctic.

Dr. Kristensen has published articles in national and international scientific, as well as popular, journals, magazines, review books and newsletters. She has given many national and international published lectures, key note speeches and talks on behalf of the Norwegian Foreign Ministries. She was recently on a lecture tour in China (Beijing area) and Europe.

Dr. Kristensen has previously published several documentary and popular science books (Towards 90 degrees South, 1987; The Magic Country, 1989; Days in Antarctica, 1993) and is now writing a series of crime fiction novels from the arctic island of Svalbard (The Dutchman`s Grave, published in Norway, 2007), The sixth man, published in Norway, 2008, Operation Fritham, published in 2009, The Dead Man in Barentsburg, published in 2011, “The Expedition” in 2015, and a further ten more books in this series. The books are being published in French, English, German, Russian as well as Nordic and fourteen other languages.

The documentary books “The Tragedy in Kings Bay” was published in 2014 and “Roald Amundsen´s last journey” was published in Norway in 2017 and in the following years in several other countries. Her original theories about what happened to Roald Amundsen and his crew on board the French Seaplane Latham – as well as the six Italians that disappeared on board the envelope of the airship “Italia” are widely recognized for their scientific originality and ingenuity.

She is at present finishing her third documentary book “Empire in the Ice” that will be published in 2024, and has started work on her new project “Astrolabe – a study of ancient mapping of the Arctic”

Stories from the Nordic North Atlantic and The Arctic. All welcome on 27 Feb 2024.

Celebrate International Polar Bear Day at UCL Scandinavian Studies, 27 February 2024. Featuring Arctic language taster and panel discussion featuring polar explorer and crime writer Monica Kristensen Solås.

Sign up for the panel discussion and reception with Eventbrite (if tickets are sold out, write to j.stougaard-nielsen(at)ucl.ac.uk for reserved seats.

Book Launch with Faroese crime writer Jógvan Isaksen

Norvik Press and the Representation of the Faroe Islands to the UK cordially invite you to the launch of Dead Men Dancing.

Join us for an evening of Faroese Noir, with renowned crime fiction and film specialist, Barry Forshaw (Crime Time) in conversation with the author Jógvan Isaksen, the translator Marita Thomsen and the screenwriter and creator of the TV crime series TROM, Torfinnur Jákupsson. We will be celebrating contemporary Faroese creativity and getting a first-hand insight into Faroese crime writing, both on the page and adapted for the screen.

A reception will follow the discussion, and copies of Dead Men Dancing will be available for purchase, as well as Walpurgis Tide.

Sign up for your free ticket here: bitly.ws/Wmw8

View our press release: Press Release – Dead Men Dancing

Visit Norvik Press: https://norvikpress.com/2023/10/05/cover-reveal-and-a-book-launch-faroesenoir/

#FaroeseNoir

Nordic/Scottish Partners in Crime

The Scottish Society for Northern Studies will be holding a virtual half-day conference on Saturday 25 November. The virtual event, titled ‘Partners in Crime’, will explore the literary cross-currents between Scotland and Scandinavia via the prism of the crime fiction genre, drawing on a range of practical and scholarly perspectives. The programme will include authors Arne Dahl (Jan Arnald) and Lin Anderson in conversation. There will also a translator panel featuring Anne Bruce, Kari Dickson and Ian Giles, and UCL’s Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen will also give a talk.

Further programme details are online at: https://www.ssns.org.uk/events/scottish-scandinavian-crime/

What Borgen gets right (and wrong) about Danish politics

Adam Price with cast members from Borgen: Power & Glory on location in Greenland

Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen (UCL Scandinavian Studies & Nordic Noir Book Club) has written a piece for The Conversation (‘an independent source of news analysis and informed comment written by academic experts, working with professional journalists who help share their knowledge with the world’) about the new season of Borgen: Power & Glory currently streaming on Netflix. If you are interested in what Borgen gets right and wrong about Danish-Greenlandic relations, this might be something for you.

Go to The Conversation to read the whole piece

Extract:

The new season has one major narrative arc: oil has been discovered in Greenland. The seasoned Nyborg rightly predicts trouble when geopolitical superpowers Russia, China and the US rush to assert themselves in the Arctic. Economic interests threaten to trump her party’s environmental ideals, and the already tense relationship between Greenland and Denmark threatens to erupt in a bitter struggle over political power and profits from oil extraction. It also depicts the unequal impacts of climate change. While colonial powers’ oil extractions have driven climate change for centuries, Indigenous people such as the Greenlandic Inuit are witnessing the effects on their vulnerable ecosystems. This reality opens old wounds in the Danish realm that includes the former colonies and current dependencies of Greenland and the Faroe Islands.

Walter Presents Non-Stop Nordic Noir Season

In the UK, Nordic Noir fans could be forgiven for thinking 2022 is going to be a great year as Walter Presents kicks off with a pan-Scandinavian season of new drama series on Channel Four

Criminal psychologist Maja Angell (Hanne Mathisen Haga) in the Norwegian Nordic Noir series Outlier selected by Walter Presents for the 2022 “Scandi season”.

Walter Presents launched January 2016 in the U.K.. Dedicated to showcasing award winning foreign language drama, the service is named after its curator, Walter Iuzzolino, a passionate drama fan as dedicated followers of Nordic Noir drama series on Channel 4 and All 4 in the U.K. will recognise. As a special treat for the long dark evenings of the Winter months, Walter serves up a “Scandi season” with new quality series from Norway, Denmark and Sweden. First up is the Norwegian eight-episodes crime series Outlier, filmed in Norway’s scenic Troms and Finnmark regions from July 2020.

Here’s the set up: Teenager Elle Jannok walks home from a party in Kautokeino (note: at the heart of Sapmi, the Sami nation, the Norwegian municipality Kautokeino has many Sami residents and most people here have Sami as their first language) when she discovers a mobile phone lying on the side of the road, ringing. The voice on the other end of the line asks for Sofie, before the connection cuts out. A few days later, in a village several hours away, the police make the grim discovery of the body of nineteen-year-old Sofie in a caravan. In London Maja Angell is researching serial killers for her dissertation when she hears about the murder case from her home county. She defies all advice, leaves the university and travels north with a message for the local police: you have charged the wrong guy for the murder. Maja is met with opposition from the police who are proud to have solved the case, but eventually their doubt begins to show. Slowly but surely, Maja becomes involved in the investigation, but the answer may lie closer to home than she’d imagined.

From the first episode, it is clear that this is classic Nordic Noir with Northern landscapes and locations playing significant roles and with a strong female lead – but it is also exciting to see in this series a great example of the growing interest in less known Nordic cultures such as the Sami.

First episode launches on Channel 4, Sunday 9 January and the boxset is available on Walter Presents via ALL 4 from Friday 7th January 2022.

Future series in Walter Presents’ Scandi season are the Danish drama Cry Wolf (launch 30 January), and the Swedish series The Truth Will Out (launch 11th February) and Snow Angels (launch 13th March).

New book on Scandinavian crime fiction from UCL Scandinavian Studies

NNBC’s own Anne Grydehøj publishes study of Contemporary French and Scandinavian Crime Fiction

International crime fiction has over the past decades been enriched by a new wave of French and Scandinavian crime fiction. In Contemporary French and Scandinavian Crime Fiction: Citizenship, Gender and Ethnicity, Dr Anne Grydehøj provides a timely and illuminating comparative study of the much lauded subversive potential of these crime traditions. Crime fiction studies have been dominated by nation-centred approaches. With Grydehøj’s study of both well-known and lesser-known writers from France and Scandinavia, we get a much needed transnational, critical study of how crime genres, in different cultural settings, have been used to work through national crises and a sharp evaluation of their relative success in engaging with major contemporary issues such as identity politics, multiculturalism and the accommodation of difference. Contemporary French and Scandinavian Crime Fiction is a significant contribution to contemporary crime fiction research, and will be equally valuable to all readers fascinated with French and Scandinavian crime fiction today.

Anne Grydehøj is Lecturer in the Department of Scandinavian Studies at UCL, where she teaches Danish language and culture. She has authored numerous articles on Scandinavian crime fiction. 

Find out more about Anne Grydehøj’s book from the publisher University of Wales Press

Norwegian Easter Crime

At a 2012 Nordic Noir Book Club event at the Grant Museum in London, UCL Scandinavian Studies Lecturer in Norwegian Studies, Dr Elettra Carbone, introduced us to the tradition of Norwegian Easter Crime fiction (Påskekrim). This talk deserves a re-run as we are again looking for the best crime novels to take to our Norwgian “hytter” (or cabins) on the fjell (mountains).

Celebrating 10 years of the “original” Nordic Noir Book Club in London

This month it is 10 years ago that the “original” Nordic Noir Book Club was founded in London. The exact day in March 2010 has disappeared in the fog of a Nordic mystery, but we have chosen the 23rd of March 2020 (also known as Nordic Day) for our anniversary. We had planned to celebrate the day with an event at University College London – the home of the book club for all these years; however, due to the pandemic, we have had to cancel the celebration, which was planned to coincide with the 100 year anniversary of the UCL Department of Scandinavian Studies.

Instead of a live celebration, we have put together a short history of the book club here, and in a couple of weeks, the Department will be publishing our brand new Introduction to Nordic Cultures (UCL Press), which we hope will be both entertaining and inspiring to all of our members and other fans of Nordic cultures and crime fiction. From the 17th of April 2020 you can read the open-access book here.

It is hard to imagine a time when Scandinavian crime fiction was still a novelty. In 2010 when we first had the idea for the Book Club, the third volume in Stieg Larsson’s global bestseller trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, had been published only five months previously in its UK English translation (in October 2009), the second season of the British adaptation of Henning Mankell’s Wallander novels featuring Kenneth Branagh had entered its second season on BBC ONE in January 2010, and it would be almost a year until the Danish drama series Forbrydelsen (The Killing) would initiate a Golden Age of translated television drama on BBC FOUR.

However, with Larsson’s Millenium Trilogy going on to sell more than 80 million copies world-wide, the final “original” instalment becoming the number one bestseller in the US in 2010, and Branagh’s version of  Wallander on television, achieving viewer numbers above 5 million in the UK alone, it was becoming evident that Swedish and Scandinavian crime fiction was finding audiences well beyond the Scandinavian region, and that readers and viewers were beginning to wonder: what is it about these famously well-ordered, peaceful and perhaps slightly boring welfare-nanny-states on the other side of the North Sea, which seem to have nurtured an abundance of violent crime stories? And why do they fascinate a global audience?

The founding of the Nordic Noir Book Club in London, as a forum for readers and viewers to come together and share their thoughts and passions for Scandinavian crime fiction and Nordic cultures, was also meant to enhance our common experience of Nordic crime literature and television by providing relevant background information and facilitating discussion about Scandinavian cultures and society – engagements that did help us all make some sense of the puzzle: Why are there still so many (good) crime stories coming out of the Nordic countries?

Thanks and congratulations to all of our members, participants, crime writers, directors, organisers, friends and students who have made this “original” Nordic Noir Book Club a great and friendly place to explore Nordic Cultures over the past decade. Please leave a comment if you have any momentous memories of the NNBC to share.

‘Borealism: In Search for the North’

Public Lecture by Professor Sylvain Briens (Paris Sorbonne) on how the North, the Nordic or ‘Borealism’ is shaped outside of the Nordic countries.

Since antiquity the North has fascinated historians, geographers, philosophers and Southern writers, who have projected various forms of discourse onto it, from scientific observations or social and political considerations to dreams, fears and fantasies. This projection can be referred to as “borealism”. Borealism describes the North as a discursive space, produced by and for the South. Borealism is also sometimes reproduced in Nordic expressions of self-identity. Join us for a public lecture at UCL in London where Professor Sylvain Briens will present aspects of “French borealism” with the example of the reception of Nordic Theater in Paris at the end of the 18th Century.

When: May 3 2018 at 5pm

Where: UCL, Gower Street, Wilkins Building, South Wing, IAS Common Ground

Contact: Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen (UCL Scandinavian Studies)