“My books enable me to talk about the big, important issues. They allow me to have a voice in the climate debate,” says Maja Lunde.
Maja Lunde’s writing life started with children’s books and TV scripts – until The History of Bees turned her life upside down. Die Geschichte der Bienen (btb) was Germany’s most sold book in any genre in 2017, putting Maja Lunde ahead of Dan Brown, Jeff Kinney and Elena Ferrante.
“Of course it’s great fun. But at the same time, it feels a bit abstract. Especially when I travel overseas and realise what a big deal this is. It almost feels like it’s about another person,” Maja says, adding. “So it’s good to come back home to my family where everything’s the same as ever.”
So far, the rights to The History of Bees have been sold to 35 languages and the follow-up, Blue, to 20. Publishers in the US, Germany and France put big money on the table to secure the books in her planned climate quartet.
Maja Lunde has her own explanation for the success:
“The feedback from readers is pretty much the same all over the world. They relate to the people in the stories, become absorbed in their lives. And they also talk a lot about the fact that the books make an impression on them, stay with them, make them see the world in a slightly different way. A lot of readers say The History of Bees made them really discover insects, see them in nature, appreciate them. Whereas with Blue, they talk about how the book made them realise what global warming could actually mean, and that they started to appreciate being able to drink a glass of clean water straight from the tap, among other things. Water is the most vital thing there is. After all, we can’t get by without it. Water is what we’re looking for on other planets. At the same time, it’s incredibly beautiful. That was my starting point for Blue.”
This autumn, Przewalski’s Horse will be published in Germany and her homeland, Norway, among others. At the centre of the new novel is the human animal. How have we humans affected other species on Earth? What are the differences between us and animals? What will it take for all of us to survive?
Conversations that make an impression
“I’ve travelled a lot in the past few years and have been lucky enough to speak to readers in a lot of countries. My experience is that we human beings are pretty similar. We often worry about the consequences of our behaviour, we ponder and think about how we affect the world, both globally and in our intimate relationships. Some conversations make a particularly strong impression. I’ve spoken several times to teenage girls who have told me, with tears in their eyes, about how my books have made them turn their focus away from themselves, away from make-up videos and their own appearance, and outwards, towards the world and our real challenges,” Lunde says, adding:
“There have been some funny experiences too, like the deadly serious Polish TV interviewer who looked right at me on Polish breakfast TV at the crack of dawn and asked: ‘Are we doomed?’, then followed up with ‘What is the meaning of life?’. There wasn’t much room for small talk over a cup of coffee there.”
Combining her new star status as an international author with life as a mother of three back in Norway isn’t a walk in the park. There are kids to look after, books to be launched all over the world, and new books to be written. On this last point, Maja is, fortunately, extremely adaptable.
“I can write anywhere at all. At home surrounded by the kids. If I have a half-hour stopover at an airport, I write. And if you weren’t sitting on the other side of the table right now, I’d probably be writing.”
“Your big international breakthrough came with the bees’ lengthy spell at the top of the German bestseller lists. Is Germany a country you’ve developed a special relationship with?”
“I’ve travelled in Germany a lot and become very fond of the country. The Germans’ love of literature runs deep, and they have endless patience and interest in listening to authors talk about their books. And they also love book readings. Often in Norwegian, even if they don’t understand the language at all. What’s more, Germans are very knowledgeable and that is also reflected in their questions about climate and ecology.”
Loves research
“In the first two books in your quartet, you’ve operated on several different timelines”.
Have you kept to this formula in book three as well?
“Some of the stories became intertwined all by themselves, like the two stories in Blue. They started as two separate images. One of an angry elderly woman alone by a waterfall, the other of a young man alone in a drought-ridden future landscape, who finds a boat on land. At first, I thought these two people belonged in separate books, but then I saw that the stories were connected and that the element running between them was water. In Przewalski’s Horse, the different timelines came about automatically, since I’ve based parts of the book on a true story, about the wild horses that were hunted and captured at the end of the 1800s and came close to extinction before the species was revived and reintroduced into Mongolia in 1992. My story also extends into the future.”
She describes the process of writing a new book as follows: “It starts with an idea. And after that I spend a lot of time familiarising myself with the people I’m writing about.”
Not to mention the time she spends on what she’s writing about.
Maja has never made any secret about the fact that she loves doing research, diving into new topics and new geographies – whether at home in Norway, on Svalbard, or along Greek beaches.
“What discovery most astonished you during the research work on your first three books?”
“The fact that bees dance to communicate. Pretty beautiful, I think.”
Inherent greed
“In Przewalski’s Horse, you and the publisher ask: ‘Can we correct our mistakes?’ Can we?”
“Some of the principal questions in my work with these books are: what is it about humans that made us the species that ruled over all the others? And can we correct or mistakes – do we, the human animal, have it in us? We surpass all other species when it comes to communication, story-telling and the transmission of knowledge. These abilities are fantastic, and are the reason for an awful lot of our achievements: the printing process, the agricultural revolution and the digital revolution, to name but a few. But they are also linked to the challenges we are now facing. Can we use our strengths in the right way? Or will our inherent greed and desire to constantly make life more comfortable win out? I don’t know. But the idea of us being animals in nature, which is of course what we are, is something I think about a great deal as I write.”
“Have you finished writing book four in your climate quartet? And can you reveal the topic?”
“I haven’t written all that much. In the past few years, I’ve worked intensively on book three, which has now finally gone to print. But I have some very definite thoughts about book four, and I’ve had them right from the moment I decided to write a quartet. The aim is to link all four books, and I picture this one taking place 12 years on from The History of Bees, in 2100. Svalbard may play a role and I’m pretty certain that I want to write about plants, seeds and everything that grows.”
“Write where it burns”
When Maja Lunde is travelling around the world, from interview to interview, some topics and questions recur:
“‘What’s your message?’.
That’s a question I often hear. And I can’t answer it. I have more questions than answers. I don’t write to promote a message but because I have stories I need to tell. Write where it burns, as we often say in Norway. For me, this is where it burns. The climate and nature crisis is what I worry about, what keeps me awake at night. And that’s probably why this is the landscape, almost literally, in which the stories come about. I also get asked whether it makes me sad writing these stories. But it makes me more sad if I don’t.
Through the stories, I can grieve, I can be consoled; through writing, I dare to dive into both the darkest thoughts and the brightest hopes. I write because I can and because I need to. If I wanted to promote a message, I ought to have become a politician. But my books enable me to speak about the big, important issues, and allow me to have a voice in the climate debate. I really appreciate that.”
“Which climate and environmental challenges is it most important for us to get to grips with first?”
“Now there’s an example of a question I appreciate being asked. The answer is: the time for prioritising is past. The climate and nature crisis is already here. We have to roll up our sleeves now. Out in the world, at home, in private, in public. We can no longer argue that something else might be more useful, or that it doesn’t matter what we do because we’re so small anyway. All of us must do everything that we know helps. Now.”
From the Norwegian by Lucy Moffatt.