Vaage: Well, we’re both country people. I was born in 1952, and a lot has changed since then in Norway. I write about the loss of tradition, and about working-class people, those who don’t do so well. I would say my heart is on the left side, though I think fiction can capture the existential aspect of these situations in a way that a political tract can’t. Just like in India now, economic and cultural transition can be very disruptive. I tend to focus on the painfulness of change — people who don’t adapt go under, and it hurts even for the people who do change, because they are not the same person any more. Every loss is painful.

Wassmo: Yes, I’m very interested in the encounter between self and society. I write about the personal aspect of these changes, how they play out in the intimate sphere. Your family sets the first limits to an individual, but also bestows care. I’m fascinated with the tangle of power and loyalty that marks family relations, and how they conflict with personal feelings. In my short story, The Motif, the girl doesn’t want to go back, she rejects her father but cannot ultimately escape her roots, where she belongs.

• Speaking of this domestic world and the vulnerable self, many of your central characters seem to be women negotiating their own limits. Is that deliberate?

Wassmo: No, I think that sense of oppression is shared by men as much as women. Men suffer, being put in a box that says ‘this is how a man should be’. It is not politically correct to talk of these repressions. To talk of homosexuality, to talk of the way men exercise power over their own gender in a terrible way. Women can at least hide, retreat into the private space. Men have to go out into the world and still find a way to hide.

... contd.