Erlend Flornes Skaret

I come from Bømlo, which is an island between the cities of Bergen and Stavanger on the west coast of Norway. I lived there until I was nineteen years old and moved away to study. I didn’t study anything that was related to literature. My writing started out late and modestly. I had first decided to become a construction engineer. My master degree was obtained at NTNU in Trondheim, a city with which Graz has a «Städtefreundschaft». I was working as a consultant, designing office buildings in Norway. But I had a growing feeling that something was missing, that I had been neglecting something, something important: The urge to write. Soon words began to drizzle out of the cracks and gaps of my everyday life. The flow of words gradually grew. I started to take notes, words on small pieces of yellow paper, passages in lunch- and toilet breaks. I read poetry and it resonated with me. I saw what literature could be. I understood that I had to redirect myself from cast concrete and steel frames over to poetry.

As a writer I continously work to create a literary documentation on how it is to excist as a human being in this world. This might sound a bit conventional, but it really is a radical exercise when it comes down to it, both philosophical and poetic, to translate excistence into text. From this effort pieces and parts crystalize, break free and turn into independant projects. Sometimes the projects take the shape of a novel, sometimes a short story, sometimes an essay and sometimes poetry. I try to cultivate the text’s own inherent structure, let the body of words grow on its own terms as opposed to force it down into a fixed form. This philosophy tend to lead to hybrids of the traditional categories of genres. I like to think that my last book f.ex., «Nomade», is a poetic novel with a nomadic structure.

One of my main artistic ambitions is to create an holistic expression, an integration, whether it is in writing or in spoken words, because the thought knows no shape, the text knows no category and life doesn’t know any genre. Hence, another main ambition is to reinvent literature. In this attempt I might of course discover that literature doesn’t have to be reinvented, but then, in the process, I’ve hopefully still managed to create an holistic and original expression of thought, an expression that I hope will turn out to be representative for what it means to be a human being in the world. I strongly believe that this is something that the world needs.