Join us on September 8 for a virtual book talk on the new novel After the Sun with author Jonas Eika and translator Sherilynn Hellberg! With moderator Katrine Øgaard Jensen, they’ll discuss the author’s American fiction debut, winner of the 2019 Nordic Council Literary Prize and out in translation by Hellberg on August 24 from Riverhead Books.
After the Sun introduces a constellation of characters embedded in wildly different points around our deeply unequal and profoundly entangled planet, from beach boys working the tourist-lined beaches of Cancún to a grieving man who attempts to merge with an alien machine in the Nevada desert. Whatever the settings or circumstances, some of which take off in surreal directions, everyone we encounter in After the Sun is at a tipping point. The realities they share—capitalist exploitation, grief, addiction, toxic masculinity—may be painful and inescapable, but still they find moments of liberation, authenticity, tenderness, and exhilaration, with one another, and in their surroundings. As Eika puts it: “The potential for transformation–or liberation, even–has to be found in the cracks: the cracks in subjectivity, the body, in the small gaps in an otherwise totalizing exploitative system.”
This event will take place as a Zoom webinar; please ask questions in the chat or send them in advance to info@amscan.org. Registration is required; please sign up at the link above.
“Political fictions aren’t supposed to be this personal. Satires aren’t supposed to be this heartbreaking. Surrealism isn’t supposed to be this real. Giving a damn isn’t supposed to be this fun. From sleights of hand to shocks to the heart, After the Sun is doing all the things you don’t expect it to, and leaving a big bold mark on what we call literature.” —Marlon James
Support has been provided by the Consulate General of Denmark in New York.
About the Speakers
Jonas Eika is one of Denmark’s youngest and most exciting writers. His debut novel, Marie House Warehouse, was awarded the Bodil og Jørgen Munch-Christensen Prize for emerging Danish writers in 2016. After the Sun has received numerous awards, including the prestigious Nordic Council Literary Prize in 2019. He lives in Copenhagen.
Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg is a writer and literary translator. She has published translations from the Danish of Johanne Bille, Ida Marie Hede, Tove Ditlevsen and Olga Ravn, and holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. In 2018, she received an American-Scandinavian Foundation Award for her translation of Caspar Eric’s Nike.
Katrine Øgaard Jensen is a writer and translator from the Danish. She is a recipient of several fellowships and awards, including the Danish Arts Foundation’s ‘Young Artistic Elite’ Fellowship in 2020 as well as the 2018 National Translation Award in Poetry for her translation of Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s book-length poem, Third-Millennium Heart (Broken Dimanche Press/Action Books 2017).
She teaches creative writing and literary translation at Columbia University, where she served as Acting Director of LTAC (Literary Translation at Columbia) from 2019-2020. Her translation of Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s Outgoing Vessel is out now from Action Books.