“There’s lightness, there’s darkness, there’s speed, there’s a sense of taking one’s time. It seems to combine all of the emotions in a kind of explosion of consciousness through music,” Halliday says of the Iberia suite by Spanish composer Isaac Albéniz (1860-1909). She came across the piece around the time she decided that she would write, and has also described it in her novel ‘Asymmetry’ (2018).

Lisa Halliday (b.1977) is an American writer. Halliday’s debut novel ‘Asymmetry’ (2018) won the Whiting Award for Fiction and made The Time’s and New York Time’s list of the best books of 2018. Halliday’s work has appeared in The Paris Review, among others. She works as a freelance editor and translator in Milan, Italy.

Lisa Halliday was interviewed by Tonny Vorm at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark in August 2019 in connection with the Louisiana Literature festival.

Camera: Rasmus Quistgaard

Edited by Klaus Elmer

Produced by Marc-Christoph Wagner

Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2020

Supported by Nordea-fonden