James Campbell interviews Per Petterson.
The farmstead where Petterson and his wife Pia live with their sheep and chickens is reached by driving through a whitened landscape, across the Glomma river which, he tells visitors, separates the urban sphere from the ‘back bus’. Asked the name of the area, he replies: ‘I say I live in the woods, near the Swedish border.’ The couple moved from the city a dozen years ago, with Pia's children from an earlier union. (It is also Petterson's second marriage.) ‘When we first came, it was so cold the duvet stuck to the wall.’ Now there is heating piped into each room and a cat or dog under every chair. – from “A Life in Writing: Per Petterson,” by James Campbell, The Guardian
