Reading Sally Rooney

Irish author Sally Rooney has with her popular novels like Normal People and Conversations with Friends reached out to an unusually broad audience: young, old, women, men, ordinary people and a fair few picky critics. Television series based on the books have widened the scope even further. Nevertheless there are some reservations in their reception: are the novels just good entertainment or do they fulfil other qualitative criteria? What makes readers so enthusiastic? Is it simply that Rooney writes good sex scenes, or do the linguistic, philosophical or formal sides of her writing make the books worth reading? And would we even have made an issue of this if the author had not been a young woman? At LitFestBergen we will discuss how good the best-selling Sally Rooney actually is at writing, and in doing so touch on the greater question of entertainment literature, quality and the relationship between literature and popular culture.

On the panel we meet Daniel Medin, professor at the American University of Paris, author and editor, Carina Beddari, critic and author, and Eirik Vassenden, professor of Nordic Literature at the University of Bergen and author of the book Kritikerens spøkelse (The Critic’s Ghost).

In collaboration with the Norwegian Critics’ Association.