Nordic Literature – not all Noir!

This post is related to the London Book Fair 2014 (see my earlier post on my visit) when I attended a seminar called Beyond Nordic Noir: An Overview of the Nordic Literary Market, which was all about literature coming out of the Nordic countries and the fact that it isn’t just crime novels!

The Beyond Nordic Noir session

This was a fascinating and informative session because I didn’t know much about the structure of the book industry in the Nordic countries. The things they discussed included:

• The Nordic market is trying to move away from the dark side of Nordic literature – the incoming trend seems to be comic books, the complete opposite! (according to a Finnish lit agency)
• Writers need to be able to develop and grow.
• Dedicated local readers are needed before a book is translated.
• There’s a need for supportive government policies for books.
• Small countries (like Iceland with its tiny population) need to decide on and maintain support for books.

Norway was discussed at length during the session and some intriguing facts came out about the Norwegian book industry:

• Publishers can keep publishing translated fiction because they have less risk due to government funding for it.
• Only 5% of 700 titles translated to other countries are actually crime!
• No VAT on books in Norway keeps prices down.
• Publishers can have a fixed price on books so booksellers can’t choose the price.
• Physical bookshops are doing well due to the lack of price competition, so they work better than UK bookshops.
• Publishers have more profit to subsidize translations.
• Everyone in the population of Norway reads at least 1 book per year.
• 40% of the population reads more than 10 books per year.
• 5000 new titles are published each year – 60-65% are by Norwegians.
• There’s 600 bookshops in Norway!
• There’s 10 internet bookstores, but no big one.

There are worries about the industry in the future though:

1. Who will be the publishers?
2. Globalisation – every 4th book is in English.
3. Centralisation – fewer players who are bigger (Amazon hasn’t launched in Norway…yet).

Then there was some discussion of certain authors and books which have come out of Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland, and each country’s literary councils which help promote their books.

There are plenty of Nordic support schemes, with translation grants, sample translation grants, travel grants for writers, authors, publishers, etc, production grants, and promotion grants.

In addition, the Nordic countries tend to join together to do joint promotions because they are successful, but it must be stressed that just because they are grouped together they are NOT all the same!

I was impressed by the fact that the book industry in Scandinavia seems so much healthier than the UK with their price fixing (which we ditched), the lack of VAT on books, and the amount of funding available for translated fiction in the Nordic countries.

There was a section by the speaker Boyd Tonkin who named his favourite 5 Nordic authors: Linn Ullman (Norway), Sofi Oksanen (Finland), Carsten Jensen (Denmark), and Sjon (Iceland, but I’m afraid I have forgotten who he picked from Sweden! Oops!

I would love to read more Scandinavian books, so far I have only read a few Nordic crime novels and one Finnish novel, and that’s pretty pathetic! Crime isn’t even one of my usual genres! I’m definitely going to look into some new Nordic books!