Knut Hamsun

Knut Hamsun (born Knud Pedersen in Lom, 1859; died in Grimstad, 1952) was a Norwegian novelist who wrote in Norwegian and Danish across the turn of the twentieth century. His work earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920, and he stands as one of the central figures of Neo-Romanticism and an early pioneer of psychological fiction. His interest in how the mind experiences the world still draws readers who want to understand modern narrative.

He grew up in hardship. At three he moved with his family to Hamarøy, near the Arctic Circle, and as a boy he lived with an uncle who, by his own account, mistreated him. For several years he took whatever work he could find, from shop assistant to schoolteacher, and in 1882 he emigrated to the United States, where he stayed in two periods until 1888. That experience produced a book from 1889 on the spiritual life of modern America, an ironic and bitter critique that he later dismissed as weak. It also contains racist passages that are hard to read today.

His breakthrough came with Hunger, which appeared in serial form around 1890. It follows a young writer who sinks into near madness through poverty in Kristiania, today's Oslo. The book draws on his own experience and uses a fragmented style that anticipates the close attention to consciousness later associated with Joyce and Woolf. Hamsun argued that literature should explore the shifting texture of the human mind, and he rejected the realism and naturalism that dominated the period. His early novels, such as Mysteries (1892) and Pan (1894), share an unpredictable, restless protagonist who wanders and struggles to fit into society.

Over time his focus moved toward rural life. His love of the countryside and his distrust of the big city led him to write much of his work in a forest cabin, and later he settled at the Nørholm estate near Grimstad. Growth of the Soil (1917), with its portrait of a stubborn settler, was among the works that won him the Nobel Prize in 1920. His prose pairs delicate descriptions of nature with a sometimes bitter irony, and in his northern novels, written in language close to local speech, he moved toward the new realism of Norway.

His politics took him into much darker territory. After the Second Boer War he grew increasingly conservative and hostile to British imperialism, and during the Second World War he publicly defended Nazi Germany and Hitler in newspaper articles. In 1943 he sent his Nobel medal to Joseph Goebbels, a gesture his biographer Thorkild Hansen read as a strategy to secure a meeting with Hitler. After the war he was prosecuted. The treason charge was dropped on the grounds that his mental faculties had deteriorated, but in 1948 he was fined and left almost ruined. He died in Grimstad in 1952, aged ninety-two.

His legacy is divided. Admirers such as Thomas Mann, Maxim Gorky, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Ernest Hemingway recognised his impact on twentieth-century fiction, and Singer called him the father of modern literature. That esteem sits alongside the controversy that his name has carried since 1945, so he is read today both as a decisive innovator and as a writer whose political stance cannot be separated from his work.