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HI, I'M ANABEL HAFSTAD.

I write poetry and speculative fiction novels, which I can only describe as 'futuristic realism.' I don't intend for them to feel dystopian — I intend for them to feel real.

 

My creativity flows with a deep tenderness for future generations, and I dedicate my books to the beautiful babies of my friends.

May they live well.

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OFFGRID

Set on a single day a hundred years from now and written from the perspectives of its seven main characters — a narrative mode inspired by Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway — my first novel, OFFGRID delves into the psyche of 100-year-old crones, untouchable trillionaires, love-struck hackers, and climate migrants ('climigrants') alike.

 

 

1

Oslo in the June of 2121

2

Heatwaves, Floods, Food Shortages

3

Massive Illegal Immigration

A split-screen cover showing a serene and untouched forest on one side and a chaotic urban

4

Humanoid Biotech Bots

5

Trillionaires vs. the Undocumented

6

A 100-Year-Old's Determination

Image created with AI Image Creator, Open AI

LATEST POEMS

As opposed to my novels, my poetry is grounded in the everyday experience of life as it is, now.

Taking Someone's Life

Can you imagine taking someone’s life


fostered from the minerals of this earth

birthed through canals of red hot flesh

held against milk-warm breasts


Imagine the generations of women and

men still alive in the thickness of their blood


See the women tightening their corsets against

the morning light; watch the men drive scythes

across summer’s grasses; see hands slit the tender 

States

Close your eyes and 


sit again on that rickety plastic chair   

as the warm blueness of sky spans

across the lake and lingonberries.

Listen — hear nothing but the buzz of bees.


find your way back into the evening twilight 

where white apple blossoms glow like ghosts, 

black silhouettes of trees loom in a theater of dusk.

High above the city echoes the call of freest swifts.

Humanity

This whole city again unconscious. Each night,

millions of dark windows and behind them

millions of strange bodies suspended in a nightly coma,

millions of strange minds suspended in the near-death 

of dreamlands.


As individuals we rise and shine 

then blank out collectively in waves. 


The bankers and teachers are all asleep now in their pajamas.

Behind the eyelids of journalists flicker the bombs of the day.

an impressionist painting of a lake that's frozen over, and a person with an ice axe crack

"A book must be an ice axe to break the frozen sea inside us."

Franz Kafka

Image created with AI Image Creator, Open AI

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