A event on Tuesday 20th May. The event starts at 19:00.
Join the author and translator of Iron Lung, Kirstine Reffstrup and Hunter Simpson, in conversation.
This event will take place at Storysmith, BS3 1JD. Doors open at 6:30pm for a 7pm start on Tuesday 20th May.
ABOUT KIRSTINE REFFSTRUP
Kirstine Reffstrup was born in Denmark and lives in Norway. Her first novel, I, Unica, was published to great acclaim in 2016 and was nominated for literary prizes in both Norway and Denmark. Her second novel, Iron Lung, was first published in 2023 and was nominated for the prestigious Politiken Literature Prize. The same year she was awarded the Stig Sæterbakken Memorial Prize.
ABOUT HUNTER SIMPSON
Hunter Simpson was born in North Carolina, USA, and lives in Copenhagen. He won the 2021 Leif and Inger Sjöberg Prize for his translation of Stine Pilgaard’s The Land of Short Sentences. He also translated Pilgaard’s first novel, My Mother Says.
ABOUT IRON LUNG
A girl is struck down by polio during the terrifying epidemic of the early 1950s. Paralysed and unable to breathe on her own, she is committed to hospital in Copenhagen and placed in an iron lung. Forty years earlier, near Budapest, a child grows up in an orphanage for boys. The child goes by the name of ‘Boy’ but is not like the others, as their body seems to transcend the categories of boy or girl. Between these two young people, there is a powerful, enigmatic bond that stretches across time and space.
‘Reading Iron Lung felt like remembering a past life, at once so foreign and familiar. With her lucid, pulsating sentences, as poetic as they are precise, Kirstine Reffstrup pierces a little hole in history and pulls a thin, but shining thread through it: a vital and very moving connection between two distant young children living at the edges of time and normality. The result is a wonderfully singular novel that is both historically rooted and full of queer fabulation, both violent and brimming with a desire for embodiment and connection.’
– Jonas Eika, author of After the Sun
‘What if bodies were not told as pathologies or perversions but rather as stories of spiders, rivers, eggs, and laboured breaths? With sensuous sensitivity, Iron Lung imagines the queer twinnings that arise between bodies cast aside by the twentieth century.’
– Selby Wynn Schwartz, author of After Sappho
‘A wonderful book: writing which is so vital and so visual coupled with a story which is strange, psychedelic, precise and filled with melancholy. Virtuosic work.'
– Aidan Cottrell-Boyce, author of The End of Nightwork
Photo credits:
Kirstine Reffstrup portrait. credit Sofie Amalie Klougart
Entry requirements: no age restrictions
This event will take place at Storysmith, BS3 1JD. Doors open at 6:30pm for a 7pm start on Tuesday 20th May.
ABOUT KIRSTINE REFFSTRUP
Kirstine Reffstrup was born in Denmark and lives in Norway. Her first novel, I, Unica, was published to great acclaim in 2016 and was nominated for literary prizes in both Norway and Denmark. Her second novel, Iron Lung, was first published in 2023 and was nominated for the prestigious Politiken Literature Prize. The same year she was awarded the Stig Sæterbakken Memorial Prize.
ABOUT HUNTER SIMPSON
Hunter Simpson was born in North Carolina, USA, and lives in Copenhagen. He won the 2021 Leif and Inger Sjöberg Prize for his translation of Stine Pilgaard’s The Land of Short Sentences. He also translated Pilgaard’s first novel, My Mother Says.
ABOUT IRON LUNG
A girl is struck down by polio during the terrifying epidemic of the early 1950s. Paralysed and unable to breathe on her own, she is committed to hospital in Copenhagen and placed in an iron lung. Forty years earlier, near Budapest, a child grows up in an orphanage for boys. The child goes by the name of ‘Boy’ but is not like the others, as their body seems to transcend the categories of boy or girl. Between these two young people, there is a powerful, enigmatic bond that stretches across time and space.
‘Reading Iron Lung felt like remembering a past life, at once so foreign and familiar. With her lucid, pulsating sentences, as poetic as they are precise, Kirstine Reffstrup pierces a little hole in history and pulls a thin, but shining thread through it: a vital and very moving connection between two distant young children living at the edges of time and normality. The result is a wonderfully singular novel that is both historically rooted and full of queer fabulation, both violent and brimming with a desire for embodiment and connection.’
– Jonas Eika, author of After the Sun
‘What if bodies were not told as pathologies or perversions but rather as stories of spiders, rivers, eggs, and laboured breaths? With sensuous sensitivity, Iron Lung imagines the queer twinnings that arise between bodies cast aside by the twentieth century.’
– Selby Wynn Schwartz, author of After Sappho
‘A wonderful book: writing which is so vital and so visual coupled with a story which is strange, psychedelic, precise and filled with melancholy. Virtuosic work.'
– Aidan Cottrell-Boyce, author of The End of Nightwork
Photo credits:
Kirstine Reffstrup portrait. credit Sofie Amalie Klougart
Entry requirements: no age restrictions
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