Editor Interview: Two Thirds North

Transnational writing

World Literature Today, Tin House, Paris Review, Descant, Granta

Tony Morrison, W.G. Sebald, Mohsin Hamid, Michael Muhammad Knight, Bohumil Hrabal, Allan Moore, Neil Geiman, Art Spiegelman, Ernest Hemingway.

Two Thirds North does not have a political or literary manifesto, but it does have a belief in the power of the story, the poem, and visual art to describe, illuminate and make real. We rely on the varied tastes of our editors to lead us away from uniformity of style and themes. We give you as much world-class poetry as prose, and we do not feed you ads.

Send us works with strong voices and themes. Your writing must show us why your topic matters.

The ideal submission shows particular care for its theme and a unique way of engaging the reader. We see perfection in the author's ability to create intimacy and give us insight into new worlds, to create a world and a culture.

Nothing, except sometimes authors will send their work outside the reading period.

All submissions are blind. We do however want a short biography which we can use in case of publication.

Everything is read by the editors and by a group of readers enrolled in the MA program at Stockholm University who rank the submissions. The short-listed pieces are then discussed and the final selection is made.

We check everything for plagiarism, of course, and whether or not it is published elsewhere.

My colleagues and I are all university teachers so we do a lot more than editing the journal. We only publish once a year and when we work on the submissions it is a short and intense period of readings and discussions. For us, it is a process of evaluation but also learning. We do not assume that our tastes are fixed and are willing to go to some lengths to evaluate ourselves as well.

If we like the core of a story, for instance, if we find it is a diamond in the rough, we do engage in quite a lot of editing.

Yes.