The NORLA conference had gathered publishers and translators from across the world to prepare for Norway being the guest of honor at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair in 2026.
“Norway has in recent years become a literary superpower,” one of the women working for NORLA told me. She and her colleagues travel the world spreading the Norwegian word, financed by the Norwegian Ministry of Culture. Since its founding in 1978, NORLA has bankrolled the translation of almost 8,000 books from Norwegian to 72 different languages. NORLA organizes seminars for publishers and translators, books international tours for Norwegian writers and chooses a list of “focus titles” it promotes abroad each year. These books are picked based not just on merit and domestic success but also on outside interest and relevance.
When asked why Norwegian writers have been so visible in the Anglophone world these last 10 years — compared with writers from bigger countries like Germany, which produces many more books — people at the NORLA conference talked about “the Norwegian model,” by which they meant a culture of cooperation. They said the key to why books from Norway do well is the seamless way in which all parts of the literary ecosystem work together: politicians and agents, lawmakers and publishing houses, readers and libraries.
It can be argued that the heart of this collaborative spirit is “the standard contract,” a template used for most book deals that, among other things, ensures that the most marginal poet gets the same cut of their sales as a bestselling crime writer — an efficient incentive for publishing houses to at least try to keep themselves broadly oriented.
At the conference, NORLA also underlined that translators are its most important talent scouts, not agents, making passion rather than profit the driving force of the literary export machinery. A month after the conference, NORLA gathered 150 translators from across the world at a retreat in the countryside. The application process for participating in the gathering had been open to anyone with a love for translation, and I assume NORLA encouraged all the attendees to like what they liked in the pool of Norwegian books and then to take it from there.
NORLA’s work is part of a large but fragile machinery, both domestically and abroad. Internationally, they collaborate with equivalent offices in other countries, facilitating exchanges between writers and translators. The director of NORLA, Margit Walsø, also chairs the European Network of Literary Translation. Within Norway, NORLA is reliant on a political goodwill that is constantly being negotiated. In March this year, the so-called Book Law was ratified in Norway, strengthening the position of non-mainstream literature by dictating fixed prices and declaring a commitment to making a wide range of books available both in minority languages and geographical nooks within the country. These little bureaucratic victories are immensely impactful in counteracting the cartel business of the large publishing houses. State funding can help small publishing houses survive among the big ones and their notorious lack of imagination, thus ensuring a lively book scene that once in a while will give birth to something great.
They hold each other so nicely, those two ancient substitutes for war: sports and literature. If power is an inevitable thing, I wish all of it looked like this. I wish all national chauvinism looked like people transporting stories from one language to another.
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