Marit Kapla, the author of “Osebol”, in conversation with her translator Carmen Montes
Saturday, April 27, 19:00 h / Sala Zaida / Conversation with the author Marit KAPLA and her translator Carmen MONTES / Simultaneous translation service / Free admission until full capacity / Activity organized by Academia de Buenas Letras de Granada in collaboratin with Granada UNESCO City of Literature and Feria del Libro de Granada.
Marit Kapla
Swedish writer and journalist. She was born in 1970 and grew up in the small town of Osebol in midwestern Sweden. In 2009 she was on the jury for innovative works at the Cannes Film Festival and was artistic director of the Gothenburg Film Festival from 2007 to 2014, founder and programming director of the festival’s digital streaming platform Draken Film from 2014 to 2015, and from 2016 to 2020 she was one of two editors-in-chief of the cultural magazine Ord&Bild. She has worked at Filmkrönikan at SvT and Nöjesguiden and is a board member of PEN Sweden. In April 2019 he debuted with the book Osebol, an extraordinary work based on interviews with almost all the inhabitants of his hometown. This work would earn her the August Prize 2019 for best fiction book, the Publicistklubbens Guldpenna Prize 2019, the Studieförbundet Vuxenskolans författarpris 2019, the Borås Tidning’s Debutant Prize 2020, the Göran Palm-stipendiet 2021, as well as the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2022 and a place in the shortlist for the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding 2022. Her latest book, Kärlek på svenska (Love in Sweden), published in 2022, consists of interviews with people from all over Sweden about love, conducted by documentary filmmaker Staffan Julén for his film of the same title. She currently lives in Gothenburg with her husband and daughter.
Carmen Montes
Carmen Montes Cano has a degree in Classical Philology and a master’s degree in Linguistics from the University of Granada, a city in whose Royal Conservatory she also studied piano and musical language, and is a professor of Swedish as a Foreign Language at the University of Stockholm.
She has translated from Swedish more than one hundred titles of very diverse genres and authors, from classics such as Tove Jansson, Ingmar Bergman, Harry Martinson, Fredrika Bremer, Sara Stridsberg or Karin Boye to bestsellers such as Henning Mankell and Camilla Läckberg.
She teaches Swedish language and literature at the Centro de Lenguas Modernas of the University of Granada, is an official Swedex examiner and a contributing lexicographer for the Swedish-Spanish/Spanish-Swedish dictionary of Norstedts ordböcker-NE, and organizes and teaches workshops on Introduction to Literary Translation.
In 2007 she received a translation grant from the Arthur Lundkvist and Maria Wine Foundation. In 2013, the Spanish Ministry of Culture awarded her the National Prize for Best Translation for Kallocaína (2012), by Swedish writer Karin Boye. In March 2023 he became a full member of the Academia de Buenas Letras de Granada and in April of the same year he received the International Translation Prize from the Swedish Academy.
Osebol
Throughout 2016 and 2017 Swedish author Marit Kapla interviewed the inhabitants of the remote village of Osebol, her hometown. Osebol reflects on the passing of generations, the seasons, the departure of people and a way of life that is almost disappearing. Osebol wants to tell the lives of those who live in the village in a special way and to do so in a direct way. Kapla, a journalist as well as a writer, has set up the tape recorder and let the people speak. They are the narrators of their own stories in their own words, but the words are arranged as if they were poems in this original memoir.
