You're listening to the LRB podcast. I'm Malin Hay. Vigdis Yacht has been well known in her native Norway since the early

90s as a writer of witty, self-revealing and self-ironising novels, which often reflect on a female

protagonist's difficult relationships with the friends, family and lovers in her orbit. So far, only five of her

more than 20 novels have been translated into English,

most recently, if only, which was published in Norwegian in 2001.

It tells the story of a tortured affair between a playwright in her 30s

and an academic in his 40s.

Joining me to talk about the novel and about her piece on Yort in the latest issue of

the LRB is the critic and theorist Toril Moy, a fellow Norwegian, though she now lives in the US,

where she is the James B. Duke Professor of Literature at Duke University. Among her many celebrated

works is the book's sexual-textual politics, as well as studies of Yulia Christavavae,

Simone de Beauvoir and Ibsen. And she has also written seven pieces for the LRB on Beauvoir,

Simone Vei, and abortion rights, among other things. Toral, thank you so much for coming on the

podcast today. Well, I'm glad to be here. So Yort is definitely becoming more famous in the Anglo-Sphere, but she is certainly less well-known here than she is in Norway.

So I wonder if you could start by just taking us briefly through her career and explaining a little bit about her development as a novelist.

So Wigtys Jort is now one of the leading Norwegian writers.

But my piece in the LRB shows that it didn't start out that way. She wrote her first novel in, I think,

1986, and she began by writing children's books.

Her second children's book is now a classic in Norwegian literature,

and I do think it should be translated for children.

It's about a 10-year-old who's passionately in love,

and of course it doesn't go anywhere,

...