Nordic Council Literature Prize Nominee 2017
The poetry collection Sunnudagsland (in English, “Sunday Country”) by Faroese author Sissal Kampmann has been nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize 2017.
Sunnudagsland” is set in the village of Vestmanna in the Faroe Islands, where the poet Sissal Kampmann was born (in 1974) and raised. After spending 24 years away, primarily in Copenhagen and Tórshavn, she returned to the village to stay a while. Her visit provides the context for this collection, the title of which refers to killing time on boring Sundays at the fringe of the world. Yet Sunnudagsland also refers to the special state of loneliness, boredom, and existential crisis that the poetic narrator seems to find herself in. Sunnudagsland is a sober and melancholy work about longing and being an outsider, as conveyed in its descriptions of futility and slow but inevitable decay. It is a phenomenology of decay: several of the poems centre on the neglect and stagnation in the village, with memory flashes of the life that once was. Sunnudagsland is Kampmann’s fifth poetry collection. She made her debut in 2011 with the collection Ravnar á ljóðleysum flogi – yrkingar úr uppgongdini (in English, “Ravens fly silently – poems from the ascent”), for which she was awarded the Klaus Rifbjerg Debutant Prize. Since then she has released four more collections that have reaffirmed her position as a powerful new lyrical voice in the Faroe Islands. Text from www.norden.org
Sunnudagsland was published in 2016 by MS and and English sample translation is available upon request from FarLit.
