Knut Hamsun

Knut Hamsun was born Knud Pedersen in 1859 at Lom, in the Gudbrandsdalen valley, and grew up in poverty at Hamarøy in Nordland, where at nine he was sent to work for an uncle who beat and starved him. For years he lived by odd jobs, as shop assistant, pedlar, shoemaker’s apprentice and schoolteacher, and he spent several years in America, publishing a caustic account of its cultural life in 1889.

Hunger (1890), the account of a starving young writer wandering Kristiania, announced a new kind of fiction: subjective, fragmentary and attentive to the unconscious life of the mind, to what Hamsun called the whisper of the blood. Mysteries (1892), Pan (1894) and Victoria (1898) extended this neo-Romantic revolt against realism and naturalism. His later novels widened to the communal life of rural Nordland, culminating in Growth of the Soil (1917), the story of a settler who clears a farm from the wilderness. Writers as different as Kafka, Thomas Mann, Hemingway and Bukowski show his influence.

Settled from 1918 at Nørholm, a manor near Grimstad, he received the Nobel Prize in 1920. His long hostility to Britain led him to support Germany during the occupation of Norway; he met Hitler and gave his Nobel medal to Goebbels. After the war he escaped criminal conviction on account of his age and alleged mental impairment, but was heavily fined. He answered his accusers in On Overgrown Paths (1949), written in his late eighties, and died in Grimstad in February 1952.