Monika Fagerholm - Class, violence and power

The event is part of the Nordic Literature Festival.

Finnish-Swedish author Monika Fagerholm received the Nordic Council Literature Prize for her novel Who Killed Bambi, in which she deals with themes such as class, violence and power. On April 20, the author will be attending the Nordic Literature Festival in Trondheim!

"Now we are going to start a new chapter. And one fine day there have been so many new chapters that none of this has happened."

Villa City is a quiet and fashionable suburb of Helsinki. But from the basement of one of the venerable houses, a deep bass thumps. At a party, a brutal gang rape is committed there. The four perpetrators, the "young boys", come from the upper social class of the place. The victim, Sascha Anckar, does not.

The local community turns a blind eye to the heinous crime. The boys' parents do their utmost to limit the damage to the family's reputation. The mothers comfort and reassure, the fathers reach for their wallets. However, the enterprising Cosmo Brant, the boys' childhood friend, does the exact opposite. Six years later, he declares that he wants to make a film about the rape, and that film will be called Who Killed Bambi?

Who Killed Bambi? is a sharp and terrifying novel about violence and power, about stories that crumble and families that disintegrate, and about an innocence lost forever. We meet the award-winning author in conversation with philosopher Heine Alexander Holmen.

Monika Fagerholm is one of the leading Finnish-Swedish writers. Wonderful Women by the Water (1987) gave her an international breakthrough, and her next three novels – Diva, The American Girl and The Glitter Scene – were all nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize. For The American Girl, Fagerholm was awarded the August Prize in Sweden. In 2016, she was awarded the Nordic Prize of the Swedish Academy and in 2020 she received the Nordic Council Literature Prize for the novel Who Killed Bambi?

Heine Alexander Holmen is a philosopher and head of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at NTNU. He has been part of the panel on Etikketaten on NRK Radio several times and has led a number of conversations at the House of Literature in Trondheim.