Sigrid Rausing > Quotes

“Orden har så stor innebörd om man har sett och levt med verkligheten de beskriver, och de är så tomma om man inte har gjort det.”
― Sigrid Rausing, Everything Is Wonderful: Memories of a Collective Farm in Estonia

“Orden har så stor innebörd om man har sett och levt mes verkligheten de beskriver, och de är så tomma om man inte har gjort det.”
― Sigrid Rausing, Everything Is Wonderful: Memories of a Collective Farm in Estonia

“What will you find in these pages? Juror Chloe Aridjis writes: ‘Ruminative narratives and more boisterous ones; some raw and instinctive, others crafted and scholarly; narratives that interweave highbrow and popular culture, others that possess a poetic stillness or otherworldly aura; works in which the author creates an elaborate alternative reality, and those in which the author is the construct him or herself. The Spanish language is being put to use in new and thrilling ways.’ And Rodrigo Fresán: ‘The adjective “interesting” is an ambiguous one. The expression, “May you live an interesting life” – apocryphally attributed to China by Westerners for many years – has been seen as either a curse or a blessing, but always as something worthy of attention. Beyond the obvious blessings, the quality of the writing, it seems to me that the additional forward-looking appeal of this selection is an eloquent sampling of how one can write in the proper direction/intention for a generation, yes, cursed by the excesses of life online and the easy and base temptations of the so-called literatura del yo – which young people think is a new trend, but is in fact very, very far from that – the compulsion for testimonial, fictions of the self that inevitably crash because they’re going too fast, or going too slow. I like to believe that here you’ll find a resistance to an era’s passing fad, and find instead the commitment to what is timeless and destined to continue engaging what has always nourished and given rise to good fiction: telling the story of a unique world, finding the form and style necessary to explore it, and make it known. In short: welcome to the work of decidedly interesting writers.”
― Sigrid Rausing, Granta 155: Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists 2

“Det var som om jag hade fått den magiska förmågan att tyda fågelsång, att förstå något som jag instinktivt kände att jag inte kunde.”
― Sigrid Rausing, Everything Is Wonderful: Memories of a Collective Farm in Estonia

“Every beginning is different after its end. Everything is always something else.”
― Sigrid Rausing, Everything Is Wonderful: Memories of a Collective Farm in Estonia

“We wanted work of the imagination. Fiction. Consciousness captured on the page. Storytelling. No essay, no memoir, no reportage. No selfies with a bit of Photoshop to pass it off as fiction. Story that is peeled from the merely testimonial, from the very tiresome use and abuse of the first person. Originality. Attitude. Yeah, attitude. Writers writing like their lives depended on it. Writers writing about things I had no idea I was interested in. Writers channeling the worlds of the inarticulate, who have not spoken for themselves or whom we cannot hear. Things that are familiar made strange or re-enchanted. Writers like the ones who came before. The ones who didn’t know about Instagram. Writers who are not readers, but rereaders. Who you think may, at some point in the future, put sentences together that will cause your spine to tingle and the hair on the nape of your neck to stand on end. Who can do it now. Writers who dare, whose ambition may have gotten the best of them, but tried anyway. That’s a tough order for a young writer, but that was our bar, and we were willing to read with an eye to the future.”
― Sigrid Rausing, Granta 155: Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists 2