Today we present the desk of Erling Kagge. "A desk like on the high seas," says Alva Gehrmann, who interviewed the writer and publisher.
In the 1990s, Erling Kagge became the first to have reached, on skis and on foot, three of the most extreme places of the world – the North Pole, the South Pole and the summit of Mount Everest. Once he had successfully completed these journeys, he felt free to devote himself to new adventures. Over the past twenty years he has been collecting contemporary art while running Kagge Forlag at the same time. It is a publishing companywith his own titles on its list: Stillhet i støyens tid (Silence – In the Age of Noise, Penguin Viking 2018) and Å gå. Ett skritt av gangen (Walking – One step at a Time, Penguin Viking 2019).
By now, Kagge is 55 years old and lives with his family in a north-western area of Oslo. Their home is in a listed building from the functionalist period, painted white and bright maritime blue. “The architects had a fixation with the sea,” Kagge tells me. “As soon as I step into my office, I feel as if I were on the bridge of a ship.” He has kept his desk clear and now, looking across it, I see a view of the darkening garden through the semi-circular array of windows. “Whenever I have time to myself at home, I come here and settle down at my desk to write,” he says.
From within the comfort of the book-lined room, the writer looks towards the outside world. On the windowsill, next to the photographs of his three daughters, Kagge has placed another memento. “This model was given to me back in the nineties, after a talk in Hamburg’s Übersee Club. It is a reminder of my childhood when I used to wonder about how the ship actually got into the bottle.” During winter days such as this one, Kagge‘s office is lit by a small table lamp next to his working area and by a luminous sculpture called Homage to P. Schatz by Ólafur Elíasson, the Icelandic-Danish artist.
Kagge believes that everyone is born an explorer. Usually, his daily round of reconnoitring is mainly made up of the three kilometre walk to his company building in the centre of town. His publisher’s desk is in stark contrast to the writer’s desk at home. Stacks of manuscripts and paperwork are piled up next to his computer and books are scattered all over the floor. These two very different places of work reflect the extreme poles of his literary creativity.
https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/75509/erling-kagge.html
https://gestalten.com/products/erling-kagge
https://booksfromnorway.com/authors/Erling+Kagge
Translated from the German by Anna Paterson