Victoria Kielland
Norway
Born in 1985, Victoria Kielland is a theater scholar. She is considered one of the most sensational voices of the Norwegian literary scene. For her first collection of prose, I lyngen, she won the most prestigious writer’s award of the Norwegian Book Industry. Her novel Meine Männer (My Men) originally appeared in Norwegian in 2021. This German translation appeared in 2023.
In My Men, Kielland follows the trail of the first American serial murderer Belle Gunness, who is said to have killed more than 40 men between 1884 and 1908. Readers expecting a novel that will offer the comforting shivers of True-Crime-Hype are on the wrong track. Kielland addresses the case in a poetic, insistent voice and without focusing on the actual deeds. The novel’s center is not the serial murders, but the woman behind them and her emotional inner life. My Men finds a language for the incomprehensible and confidently circumvents all sensationalism. A “short, sharp shock of a book,” says the Guardian.
My Men. Translated into English by Damion Searls. 2023
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