Meet The Translator: Becky Crook Presents Seven Days In August

Join Folio Seattle and the Northwest Interpreters and Translators Society in celebrating the gift translators have to offer, and expand your view of universal literature with a series of monthly presentations featuring local translators and their books.

Brit Bildøen made her literary debut in 1991 with a collection of poetry Bilde av menn (Images of men). In 1998 she had her literary breakthrough with the novel Tvillingfeber (Twin fever). For this she was nominated to the Brage Award for best novel and awarded the Oslo prize and Nynorsk literary Award. For her third novel, Landfastlykke (Landlocked), 2001, she was awarded the Melsom Prize and Sigmund Skard-scholarship. Both Alt som er (All there is), 2004, and Mitt milde vesen (My gentle self), 2006, have been praised by the critics. Her novel, Seven Days in August was longlisted for Dublin International Lit. Awards, and won the prestigious P2-lytternes Novel Prize 2014. In August 2020 she was awarded the Amalie Skram Prize. Bildøen has translated several novels and children’s books, and is also a children’s books author herself.

A few years after the deadly 2011 terror attack in Norway’s Utøya Island, Otto and Sofie are attempting to put the pieces of their life back together without their beloved daughter, who was murdered alongside countless other youths on one of the worst days in Norway’s history. Seven Days in August is the story of Otto and Sofie’s grief, painstakingly narrated over a one week window into their attempts to navigate a life together as they face their own helplessness and mortality.

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Becky L. Crook is a writer and literary translator of Norwegian and German fiction, nonfiction and poetry with shorter works appearing in Freeman’s, Granta, and Guernica. In Fall 2020 she was selected to attend a poetry craft intensive with Tin House for her own work in progress. She has degrees in linguistics and theology. In 2010, she founded SAND, an English literary arts journal in Berlin which is now in its tenth year. She currently lives with her family on an island near Seattle.