On July 22, 2011, a white supremacist killed eight people at Oslo’s Government Center in Norway and then terrorized the idyllic island of Utøya, where he executed sixty-nine more people, mostly teenagers. The country had never suffered such a massacre, and in the aftermath, the entire population was reeling.

Utøya, the Norwegian Labor Party’s summer camp for youth, a beloved place where many Norwegians learned about democratic values and processes, made lifelong friendships, and developed a vision for a just society, became mired in grief and discord. When Jørgen Watne Frydnes took on the daunting task of rebuilding the island and charting its future, he had to figure out a compassionate and just way forward. He made a radical decision: he set out to talk with each family of a murdered person, seeking to understand their needs and their hopes so that the future of the island could include their wishes and concerns. This emotionally grueling work, which was never considered in the scholarly literature on commemoration, led to a true renewal of Utøya, resulting in a meaningful memorial to those who were lost as well as beautiful surroundings for campers who come there to study democracy and peace.

Frydnes’s narrative, originally published in Norwegian, is structured around the seasons of the year and the landscape of the island, and tracks one person’s account of learning how to remember, commemorate, and honor the dead, and acknowledge a mass tragedy, and yet also create a nurturing, aspirational space for hope.

Jørgen Watne Frydnes is the director of PEN Norway and former director of Utøya, a Norwegian island owned by the Workers’ Youth League. He previously worked at Doctors Without Borders. He is also chair of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee and a board member of The Norwegian Helsinki Committee. Jørgen has led the effort to rebuild Utøya after the terrorist attack in 2011.

“Frydnes has now given the rest of the world a revelatory guide to rebuilding, renewing, and remembering in the face of catastrophic, unprecedented terror. His first-person reflections on leading Utøya back to life after the devastating mass murder there in July 2011 are a model for rebuilding as a form of commemoration. It is also a cutting edge approach to contemporary scholarship in memory studies, humanizing and self-critically examining otherwise harrowing policy and psychological processes.”—James Young, author of The Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between

“This is a book about hope emerging out of darkness. At its core is a very human story, a kind of bildungsroman, told by an individual confronted with and rising to meet the challenge of commemorating the unimaginable. In the end, Frydnes discovers – as we readers do, too – that the process itself is where the alchemy of memory turns pain into progress and despair into hope.”—Alice M. Greenwald, founding director of the 9/11 Memorial Museum

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