The Mariana Trench

Ida Lødemel Tvedt

Original title: Marianegropen
Publisher: Gyldendal , 2019
Genre: Essay
Pages: 360 pages

Ida Lødemel Tvedt’s first book has been hailed by Norwegian critics for its vitality and uncompromising wit. She ranges brilliantly over a wide range of topics: nationalism and solitude, love and rage, milk and makeup, pornography and standup comedy, intellectual posturing and the role of confession in public life. A deeply uncanny portrait of our time emerges, as her encounters with autistic children and her senile grandmother, Kremlin the cockroach and Sebastian the alt-right ideologue, all become occasions for slapstick dialectics and a defiantly lush prose.

The author moves between Norway and New York, using contemporary writers, comedians and strangers as lenses for looking at the relationship between political moods and her own experiences. Chapters shift between differing essayistic modes, from portraits and interviews, to street wanderings and monologues, amounting to a spectacular experiment in ecstatic essayism.

Foreign rights

Danish: KLIM Publishing House
German: Kommode Verlag in Switzerland
Dutch: Atlas Contact
English: Excerpt published in N+1 autumn edition 2020

Ida Lødemel Tvedt’s essay debut may be many things, but first and foremost it is staggeringly good.’

Kjetil Røed, Vårt Land

«… a collection of intense, hungry essays.»
Ida Vågsether, Stavanger Aftenblad

There is a soaring in Ida Lødemel Tvedt’s debut […] The combination of knowledge, independent reflection, life experience, sensitivity and imagination renders her capable of going “beyond that anxious, manly babble about the truth and its shortcomings.

Frode Johansen Riopelle, Morgenbladet

Language that glitters like a shimmering deep sea fish

Timo Posselt, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Switzerland

Norway’s Joan Didion

Thomas Hummitzsch, Intellectures, Germany

A wonderful author with a strong and original language

Finn Canonica, Das Magazin, Switzerland

Ida Lødemel Tvedt

Portrait: private

Ida Lødemel Tvedt (b. 1987) is an essayist based in Oslo. In 2021 she received the Arne Hestenes Award for outstanding cultural journalism. She is currently working on her second book, due to be published in Norwegian in the Spring 2022. Lødemel Tvedt holds an MFA in nonfiction from Columbia University and an MA from The New School for Social Research. She has taught classes on the literary essay at Columbia and at The New School, and she has been a guest lecturer at numerous other institutions. Lødemel Tvedt’s work has appeared in many established news journals and magazines, including Guernica, Das Magazin, Vagant, Vinduet and N+1. . You can read the recently published piece: Heimat(t), here.