Author Interview: Julia Martinčič
Q&A with the contributors from our latest issue.
Julia Martinčič is a Norwegian author with roots in Slovenia. She has a BA in Journalism from City, University of London. Her debut collection of short stories, Hjertet er en alien (The Heart is an Alien), was published in 2023 by Tiden. She lives and works in Oslo. Her piece ‘Great Brit! A Eulogy’ appears in Hinterland Issue 15.
What’s the last thing (except for this!) that you wrote?
A notification I made this morning: Svar Hinterland! (“Answer Hinterland!”). A message to my boyfriend: a simple, yet powerful cow emoji. A sentence in my physical notebook, paraphrasing the Danish poet Inger Christensen: Tallenes skjulte tale er et førspråklig språk, universet som kommer til orde. (“The hidden speech of numbers is a pre-linguistic language, the universe itself speaking”).
What’s a recent discovery that you can’t keep quiet about?
I love watching short films (instead of movie night you can have film tapas!), and recently watched Death and Transfiguration by Terence Davies. A film that manages to capture a whole life in 26 and a half minutes.
Words to live by?
The fact that I can’t seem to come up with anything must mean that I’m either not much of an inspirational person, or someone who feels childishly opposed to live by words at all, even though my own life consists of writing and reading. Be nice.
Tell us something about yourself that surprises people...
I’m currently learning to play the banjo. Yee-haw.
What’s your piece in this issue about?
The piece is about the years I lived in England. It’s about pronunciation and mispronunciation; the loneliness of being almost fluent in a language, but not quite. I wrote the essay as if in a trance after seven years without having written a single text in English. I think I needed to see if there were any remnants of that person left in me.
Issue 15 is available to order over at our webstore now, or in good bookshops.