Steph of Wheredunnit fame mentioned over on the crime and mystery fiction friendfeed room that Open Book on Radio 4 had a piece on Scandinavian crime fiction, or Scandawegian as they referred to it, the other day (repeated today at 4pm as well). Presented by Mariella Frostup whose father is Norwegian, she spoke to crime fiction critic Michael Carlson about Sjowall and Wahloo, Henning Mankell, Yrsa Sigurdardottir, Stieg Larsson and also Karin Fossum and Jo Nesbo (no K O Dahl though). Some interesting observations from Carlson eg that Scandinavian languages have smaller vocabularies than eg English and thus lend themselves to translation easier. The Scandinavian feature is only ten minutes long so best listened to perhaps, than have me paraphrase it incorrectly!
Listen again via iplayer. The Scandinavian bit is about 20 minutes in.
And if you want to check out more Scandinavian authors and/or reviews of books mentioned in the programme, go to the Scandinavian authors page on Euro Crime.
Thank you for that Karen,
ReplyDeletemost interesting programme.
By the way --not only has
Mariella Frostup a Norwegian
Dad--but she was born in Norway.