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A Place In Time  
Locality and change in the literature of the Baltic region

It is notably difficult to identify any one aspect that might be characteristic of the literature that is written at the present time, in the first decade of the new millennium. The task is made even more difficult by attempting to find the least common denominator not only of the literature written in one language but of many different cultures and literary traditions.

Yet the attempt to perceive how writing in the Baltic region mirrors the present might prove an interesting and challenging quest. The multitude of historical novels and plays  published in Finnish and Swedish during the last few years might give rise to the notion that the present time feels too overwhelmingly complex to tackle directly. Of course reconstructing and scrutinizating the past or visualizing the future may be alternative means to grasp the moment we live in, to capture the acute and burning sense of its unique presence.
So what is characteristic of the present time?
 
 "One of the most important tools of the writer ", says the Swedish author Kerstin Ekman , " is the instinct for what is missing in a society ". /…/ " To  bring to the surface what has been repressed, denied, or rendered invisible is the most important task of the writer. "

By scrutinizing the current themes of the public discourse, and those issues which have not become part thereof, that which is politically incorrect to say aloud or simply outside the field of vision, and then trying to find out how literature deals with attempting to fill in these blind spots, I imagine that we may get an idea of the frontiers along which it engages itself: in the struggle against literary conventions, against easily bought solutions, numbing or obscuring vision.

Littera Baltica 2006 is also going to focus on place and locality. We have a long history of cultural exchange, but at the same time great differences, between the Nordic and the Baltic countries. By including voices of immigrant writers and linguistic minorities, we aim to display something of the diversity of contemporary writing in the Baltic region.