English

Ida Hove Solberg is a Norwegian poet, editor, translator and critic with a Ph.D. in Translation Studies from the University of Oslo. In 2024, they published their narrative poetry book Var det grønt, which was nominated for the Prisma Award in the category «Nordic Work of the Year». In 2014 they co-founded Mellom, Norway’s first literary magazine for translated literature, and in 2023 the micro press Lo forlag. As a translator they’ve worked with the poetry of Athena Farrokhzad and Rasha Abdulhadi, and together with Sofia Knudsen Estifanos they’ve translated Terrance Hayes’ American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin.

Var det grønt is a story of dissolution, a song of mourning, and a protest that springs from a clear instant in an otherwise dark world, where nature and queer rights – interconnected and fragile as they are – have collapsed in parallel.

At that moment, when existence ends, the poems reach for what was, glimpses of a morning at the breakfast table, the sounds of a radio, a record player or a tram, a dawning sense that something is changing: memories that are about to fade along with the moose and the hare, with existence and the word.