HESTENES KLAN: Clan of the Horses/Hestenes klan

- VELKOMMEN -

Bestselgeren Hestenes klan ble utgitt av Cappelen Damm i 2010 og er regnet som en crossover, det vil si en ungdomsbok som har potensial for å nå et voksent publikum.

Hestenes klan er ikke en hesteroman i tradisjonell forstand, men en roman som blant annet tematiserer møtepunktet mellom hest og menneske. Et møtepunkt som lett kan overføres til menneskets møte med naturen - både den ytre naturen og vår indre. Når det er sagt vil nok mange hestefolk finne en ekstra dimensjon i romanen fordi den presenterer en filosofi knyttet til hestehåndtering som er ukjent for de fleste. Dette er nok også grunnen til at romanen har fått særlig stor oppmerksomhet i hestemiljøet og svært god mottakelse i nisjeredaksjoner både i Norge og i Sverige (se omtale/blogger).

Live Bonnevie ble nominert til Debutantprisen 2010 av Kulturdepartementet. Juryens begunnelse:
"Bonnevie skriver medrivende og underholdende om de store spørsmålene i livet. Dette er et dyktig oppbygd drama som holder leseren fanget fra første til siste side. De intense skildringene av mennesker, dyr og natur bidrar også til at dette har blitt en svært fengende romandebut."

Hestenes klan er ute i 5. opplag og er også utgitt på tysk under tittelen Zwischen Himmel und Erde.

torsdag 13. mai 2010

Clan of the Horses/Hestenes klan - the writing

I think I was around 15 the first time I realized that I would write a book some day - and it somehow felt like a book of substantial volume, even then.
Around 1994 I started out writing about a topic that I found very intriguing and close to heart. It was a project on horses and - in particular – people whom where good at handling them. At the time I had been riding for about fifteen years and I put down on paper everything I had ever learned about horses.

But in the midst of the creative writing process I came to realize that I was not the only one working on a novel with the title “The Horsewhisperer”. The disappointment of having lost both the title and some key elements of my project to another author was hard to accept, but at the time I felt that I lacked the experience and maturity needed to do a rewrite. The only possibility left was to wait - until time was ripe. For years I kept the script in a cool, dark place – like a bottle of wine in a wine cellar. Occasionally I would write down some scenes or some dialogue, but it could be month, even years between each time I wrote these fragments of my future novel.

Then something happened that changed everything, and it gave me a new direction and a very different energy in both my way of being with horses and my way of writing about it. After more than a decade of research on what some people refer to as “the Path of the Horse”. After having seen some of the great trainers of our time and after having tried to fill in some missing pieces in a larger puzzle, I suddenly felt I had a story I really needed to tell. A very different story from the one I tried to tell back in the mid nineties.

The novel Clan of the Horses, is not based on someone else’s experience, it is the result of a life lived and time spent with horses. It is first and foremost a novel about becoming who you are meant to be. It is my experience that horses can guide us on the journey of becoming whole, authentic - and true to our own soul. Horses therefore play an important part in the story, as they have played an important part in my life. Readers unfamiliar with horses tend to read the horse as a metaphor or a symbol for something else, and I guess in some way that is what horses really are.

Personally I think of the novel as an invitation, it is, for what it is worth, nothing more than the sum of all my experience – both in life and with horses. I have taken out 220 pages (100.000 words from the original script), but I have made no compromises when it comes to the core of the story. What I have ended up with is an authentic story that I recognize as the story I – at the age of 15 - felt I was going to write some day.