How to write about a man best known for telling his own story? Today, Primo Levi is viewed as one of our most important witnesses of Nazi atrocities. Writing in what Philip Roth de
What do Norway and North-Korea have in common? The answer is the Russian border. Between Erika Fatland’s egalitarian homeland and the hermetically sealed northeast Asian dictator
A year ago, I was given the chance to leaf through Roald Dahl’s mother’s book of Norwegian fairy tales. The slim volume, held in the Roald Dahl archives in Great Missenden, wer
Knut Hamsun detested England. To the Nobel laureate, the island in the west embodied modernity at its worst: industrialism, materialism, the uprooting of mankind from its rural pas
In 2017, there were two Norwegian nominees for the Nordic Council Literature Prize. One was Vigdis Hjorth, who’s controversial yet acclaimed novel Arv og Miljø (recently publish
In the spring of 2019, after the ‘caliphate’ established by ISIS had finally crumbled, children of jihadists and their niqab-clad mothers filled the refugee camp in Al-Hol, amo
In the last decade, Norwegians appear to have become connoisseurs of unhurried culture, beginning with the introduction of ‘slow-TV’ in 2009, when we discovered that live foota
Graham Greene once called Norway ‘a little patch of careless culture at the edge of the sea and of the forest’, and before 22 July 2011, that was how we felt – tucked away at
