These Are Different Days

Ruth Lillegraven

Original title: Dette er andre dagar
Publisher: Tiden Norsk Forlag, 2020
Genre: Narrative poems
Pages: 128 pages

In the spring of 2020, everything changed.

These are Different Days (Dette er andre dagar) takes us back to the first lockdown, to homeschooling and the local forest, and life abruptly constricted. The book also takes giant leaps in space and time. It moves from a village nestled in the mountains to the permafrost of Alaska, between history and the future.

It gives us a perspective beyond the bubble formed by a country at a standstill. Because outside, the world, with its conflicts and crisis, is knocking.

Ruth Lillegraven’s contribution to COVID literature is a necessary memento mori.

Ingunn Økland, Aftenposten

The poems about these different days travel straight to the heart … In her distinctive style Lillegraven depicts the spring of 2020 through episodes from her own and her family’s life, while she simultaneously looks out into the world, expanding her gaze to include national and global events,
looking backward and forward in time. The perspective that she creates explores these different days from a variety of angles. She is an unfaltering wordsmith who also knows how to employ figurative language.

Hardanger Folkeblad, Mette Bleken

Ruth Lillegraven

Ruth Lillegraven debuted in 2005 with a collection of poetry entitled Big Bad Poems. Since then, she has published a novel, six poetry collections, as well as children books. Her work has been nominated for several prizes and she was awarded, among other distinctions, the Brage Prize and the Nynorsk Literature Prize. Her first psychological crime thriller, Everything is Mine (Alt er mitt), has enjoyed tremendous success and multiple international sales.