Solvej Balle (born 1962) has been around in the literary world for some time. She has published several novels, poems and short prose. Balle made her debut at the age of twenty-four and then established her name as a writer in the 1990s, with Ifjølge Loven, inspired by great storytellers such as Kafka and Borges.
Now she is storming the literary stages with her latest work, the seven-volume On the Calculation of Volume. In this surrealist novel, Tara Selter lives in a large house in Bremen with a small collective of time-prisoners, trapped on the date 18 November. As more and more people manage to find the house, it becomes clear that many more people worldwide are trapped on this date than thought. It causes Tara and her peers to face complicated decisions.
The fourth novel of the seven-part series appears during the Crossing Border festival week.