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If you're a Norwegian writer, you are not visible in the world. The door of the English language is very hard to open for a Norwegian writer.

My father was a Norwegian tenor and my mother a New York Irish librarian.

I worked in a bookstore in Oslo, importing the English-language books.

Well, I have a Norwegian father who emigrated to America in the 1950s, and he still speaks with varying degrees of an accent. Over my lifetime my ear has been well-tuned to that accent. Any first generation kid has that wonderful gift from their parents.

Occasionally I write a small piece or the odd lecture in English, and I teach in English, but my fiction is always written in German.

My dad was an English professor.

My father is Swedish and my mother is French.

I want my words to survive translation. I know when I write a book now I will have to go and spend three days being intensely interrogated by journalists in Denmark or wherever. That fact, I believe, informs the way I write - with those Danish journalists leaning over my shoulder.

My father was this huge, influential intellectual in the '60s and '70s. He was one of the main players in the cultural discussion in Sweden, the editor of papers.

We had all these famous writers in Sweden and from all over the world home at dinner. I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be a highbrow writer as my father. He never, ever read anything like crime novels. He wrote biographies of Dante, James Joyce, August Strindberg and Joseph Conrad.