Wait, Blink ― A Perfect Picture of Inner Life

Wait, Blink is the first English-language translation of award-winning Norwegian author Gunnhild Øyehaug’s inventive novel of interwoven stories following a group of artistic women pursuing their ambitions despite endless distractions and disappointments.

Sigrid is a young literature student trying to find her voice as a writer when she falls in love with an older, established author, whose lifestyle soon overwhelms her values and once-clear vision. Trine has reluctantly become a mother and struggles to create as a performance artist. The aspiring movie director Linnea scouts locations in Copenhagen for a film she will never make. As these characters’ stories collide and intersect, they find that dealing with the pressures of their lives also means coming to grips with a world both frightening and joyously ridiculous.

Wait, Blink combines wild associations, quotations, coincidences, and other peculiar details into a unique tale that is both humorous and profound. Full of the playfulness that drew acclaim for her story collection Knots, Gunnhild Øyehaug’s Wait, Blink—her first novel to be translated into English—is a jolt of desire and fantasy, romance and regret: a fable about what it means to own up to the weirdness inside us all.

Gunnhild Oyehaug is an award-winning Norwegian poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Her story collection Knots was published by FSG in 2017, and Wait, Blink has been made into the acclaimed film Women in Oversized Men’s Shirts.She has also worked as a coeditor of the literary journals Vagant and Kraftsentrum. Oyehaug lives in Bergen, where she teaches creative writing.

Kari Dickson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and grew up bilingual. She has a BA in Scandinavian studies and an MA in translation. Before becoming a translator, she worked in theater in London and Oslo. She teaches in the Scandinavian department at the University of Edinburgh.