Swedish Glory on National Poetry Day

Swedish poet Tomas Transtömmer won the Nobel Prize of literature!!!

And here I am, performing as Lou Ice, one of the guests
at Hammer & Tongue at Komedia in Brighton,
warming up for another great Swede ...

Henry Bowers aka Kung Henry who told us a few things about darkness

As usual it was a great night hosted by Rosy Carrick and Mike Parker. Both me and Henry did a poem each in Swedish which went down well as there were a few Swedish people in the audience. I had recruited them when I did a performance/talk at Loxdale Language Centre last week ...

The open slam was won by a guy called Ed who did an angry poem, defending people who are wrongly accused of being paedophiles. It seemed like the slam was more intense than usual as a lot of people went over the allocated time of three minutes, caring more about the poetry than the points!

The other guest of the evening was the brilliant story-teller Wilf Merttens.

And thanks to performing I got invited to do two more gigs this autumn. Check it out here!

Loxdale Centre Re-Visited - England or Sweden?

Today I time-travelled. I was back at Loxdale Centre in Portslade, the place where I studied English for three months when I first arrived in Brighton back in 2001.

I was invited to do a talk/lecture that I called "Life after Loxdale". I talked about my "6 different lives" in Brighton. I've left Brighton 5 times and this is the 6th time I'm back ... I never left Brighton because I was unhappy here. There were other reasons: doing a writing course in Stockholm, having a novel published in Sweden, doing book promotion etc. and going travelling to Thailand & New Zealand.

A lot of the students (all Swedish) asked if I'm going to stay in England forever. I don't have an answer to that, but all I know is that Brighton feels like my home. It would be wiser to move back to Sweden as it would be better for my writing career (already being established and having a publisher that is asking for a second book), but at the moment I'm trying to move that writing career to the UK ...

(A writer should be able to live anywhere in the world, but nowadays being a writer includes doing a lot of public apperances and going to meetings and connect with other writers, so the best thing is to actually live in the country where your work is published.)

One thing I forgot to mention is that after 9 years on and of in the UK I still wake up every morning and feel a bit excited being here. It's not like travelling anymore, but there's still this sense of living in a different country where they eat different food and have different money etc. Every day is still a challenge. I still learn new words. I make sure to look up words I come across that I don't understand. Every day people still ask me where I'm from. I haven't worked on getting rid of my accent, because my intention is not to "become English". It opens up for a lot of interesting meetings being from another country and people are in general very impressed that I live and work and write and exist in a country and a language that is not mine.

And I'll never get used to some cultural things. The cheek kissing for example. When I first arrived I thought that if someone kissed my cheek it meant they really loved me! (In Sweden people barely hug, hand-shaking is the most popular way of greeting people.) Also I still find it weird if you go for dinner round somebody's house and they just give you a plate of food expecting you to be happy with the size of the meal. (In Sweden the pots are put on the table and everybody helps themselves.)

Lastly ... if you have two choices always go for the most difficult one. That's how you learn and develop yourself. It would be easier for me to live in Sweden, but I'd be bored ...

Hopefully I inspired some of the students to stay in England after their course is finished ... I would be very happy to this talk about how I ended up staying in England (and share tips on how to find a place to live and a job) at other language schools, so please contact me if you know any other schools that might be interested.

This was the second time I was back at Loxdale. To read about my first visit, please click here.

First School Talk in English

I've done a lot of school visits in Sweden, talking about my writing and my debut novel Punkindustriell hårdrockare med attityd. Today I did my first school talk in England. In English obviously. The only thing that wasn't English about it was the audience - they were all Swedish students at Loxdale Centre in Portslade. Eight years ago I went to this school myself and it was great to be back.

I called my one-woman-show "Life after Loxdale" and spoke about my life in England, how I first made friends, found a job and a place to live. A lot of the students laughed when I showed pictures of myself as a dinner lady and a barmaid. But the focus was on my career as a writer and performance poet. How I started out going to poetry groups just to make friends and ended up being invited to perform in Berlin. How the isolation I first felt when I moved to England resulted in writing novels. And I tried to explain the battle in my head between two languages.

In between the talking I performed poems that were inspired by my life and the audience was also very lucky to hear an extract from Replacing Angel - my first English novel in progress. It seemed to go down well and one guy said it felt very real, as if I had experienced it myself.

After the talk I stayed for lunch and reminisced about the good old days. My time at Loxdale is probably the most important time of my life as I went there when I was 19, straight after finishing school in Sweden. It was the beginning of my adult life and apart from learning to speak English I also built up the confidence to stay in England and go my own way in life. I'm very pleased that I got invited back for another talk next term.

Special thanks to Saskia, my former drama teacher and friend who came to listen and took the picture.