This year Nordic Literature Week takes place from 9 – 15 November and this year's theme is “The Nordics in the world”. The year 2020 is a challenging year, with climate change hot on the horizon and the unpredictable outbreak of a pandemic COVID-19. With these events, one cannot fail to reflect upon what it means to be a citizen of a global world. What responsibility do we have as citizens, and what unites us and separates us from each other in the world?
Nordic Literature Week aims to fill Nordic and Baltic schools and libraries with readings and exhibitions, debates about the role of literature in our culture. And even though we are in different places in the world, we are all participating in the same event and part of the same reading community.
On the big read aloud day on November the 9th, young and old will gather in schools and libraries throughout the Nordic and the Baltic countries to listen to the readings of the same texts. “Morning Dawn” for children and youths will be organized in the first half of the day, and “Evening Dusk” – readings for adults will take place in the evening. We invite you to register your school, library or educational institution for Nordic Literature Week: https://www.nordisklitteratur.org/lv/pieteikties/
This year's reading books sparkle with life and ask big questions about life and death, privileges, rights, and responsibilities in the world. The books describe human characteristics that both unite us and, at the same time, separate us from each other and making us individuals. All the chosen read-aloud books this year have won a Nordic Council Literature Prize.
Children will read the seek-and-find book "Everyone counts", written by the Norwegian author and illustrator Kristin Roskifte. The book will be published in Latvian by the publishing house "Liels un mazs" in the end of October 2020. Kristin Roskifte won the Nordic Council Children's and Youth Literature Prize for the book Everybody counts in 2019. The teenagers will read the novel "Captain's Monkey" by the Swedish writer Jakob Vegelius. The story stretches from a dark harbour in Lisbon, across the oceans, to the glorious and luxurious courts of Indian Maharaja from a bygone era. Jakob Wegelius won the Nordic Council Children's and Youth Literature Prize for the book The Murderer's Ape in 2015. Adults will read excerpts from the novel “Hotel Silence" by Icelandic writer Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir. “Hotel Silence” is a social realist novel with satirical tendencies. Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir won the Nordic Council Literature Prize for the novel Hotel Silence in 2018.
"Seven and a half billion people on the same planet. Each of them has a unique history. Everyone counts. One of them is you!"
More information: https://www.nordisklitteratur.org/lv
