Jonas Hassen Khemiri: The Sisters

We are delighted to bring you a new episode of our podcast: a conversation with Jonas Hassen Khemiri. He is a Swedish novelist and playwright, a teacher on the creative writing course at NYU and a finalist for the National Book Award. His writing is warm and playful, often concerned with his own Swedish-Tunisian heritage and with the joys and exasperations of being a writer, a father and a partner — rarely in that order. The Sisters is his latest novel, and his first to be written originally in English. It’s a wonderful, expansive book set between Tunis, Stockholm, Paris, Berlin and New York, beginning in 1999 and ending several decades later, the three sisters of the title having grown from adolescence into middle age. 

He spoke to Magnus about his approach to fiction, about place, ambition, migration and home, as well as David Foster Wallace, the Rockefeller Building, IKEA bags and the strange relief that comes from writing your own family into a novel. 

Interviewed and edited by Magnus Rena