Bad Girls
Winner of the Tarjei Vesaas Debut Prize
Winner of the LO Literature Prize
A girl falls in love with another girl but is betrayed just as she starts feeling certain that her feelings are real. The disappearance of a childhood friend haunts a young, idealistic woman and shatters her self-image. A woman is given Ritalin by a man she desires, throwing her into unpredictable ups and downs she can’t control.
In the seven short stories of Bad Girls, girls take center stage. Girls who want to escape from the everyday and seek excitement and trasngressive experiences. Girls who feel lonely and alienated, who have mothers from Asia and fathers at sea. Girls searching for meaning but finding it in the wrong places, who are damaged and inflict damage.
“Through seven tightly composed short stories, we follow different girls at various stages of life. With crystal-clear observations, psychological insight, and stylistic flair, Goksøyr demonstrates both daring and sensitivity.”
From the Vesaas debut prize nomination jury statement
“In sparkling short stories, we are taken to Thai restaurants in small places, where community is created and strengthened over food and mutual support. We are taken to an expensive living room where a respected man takes what he wants, with an aura of matter-of-factness and a total lack of interest in the humanity of others.
We meet people who are not unconditionally good, but who are fundamentally human. Who burn with conflicting desires and needs, follow them, with consequences that may not have been unexpected, but not willful. In a poetic way, the author depicts how human emotions and drives work between the formal and informal power structures of society. […]
[The stories] capture the complexity of life and how we all struggle in our lives, with doing the right thing and doing what is true to us. It describes people and environments that we otherwise rarely see in Norwegian literature and public life. It makes it possible for more people to read stories they recognize themselves in, and for more people to read stories they do not recognize themselves in.”
From the LO Literature Prize jury leader Julie Lødrup’s speech
