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Knut Hamsun in July 1939, 79 years
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| Birth name | Knud Pedersen | | Birth date | August 4, 1859 | | Place of birth | Lom, Norway, Gudbrandsdal � Norway | | Date of death | February 19, 1952(age 92) | | Pen name |
Knut Hamsun
Knut Hamsund
Knut Hamsunn
Knut Pederson
Knut Pedersen Hamsund
Knud Thode | | Nationality | Norwegian | | Occupation | Author, poet, dramatist, social critic | | Period | 1877 - 1949 | | Influenced by | Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henrik Ibsen, Arthur Schopenhauer, Magdalena Thoresen, Georg Brandes, Henrik Wergeland, Lord Byron | | Influenced | Ernest Hemingway, Isaac Singer, Thomas Mann, Maxim Gorky, Charles Bukowski, John Fante, Lars Saabye Christensen, Gabriel Scott, Henry Miller, Franz Kafka | | Literary movement | Neo-romanticism
Neo-realism | | Awards |
Nobel Prize In Literature
1920 |
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Knut Hamsun (August 4, 1859 - February 19, 1952) was a a Norwegian author. He was praised by King Haakon VII of Norway as Norway's soul. In 1920, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He insisted that the main object of modern literature should be the intricacies of the human mind, that writers should describe the "whisper of blood, and the pleading of bone marrow". Hamsun's literary debut, and perhaps the work for which he is most known, was the 1890 psychological novel Hunger.
Hamsun's reputation was severely tarnished by his vehement advocacy of Nazi Germany both before World War II and after Germany occupied Norway in April, 1940. He lionized leading Nazis and in 1943, in the middle of the war, he mailed his Nobel medal to Joseph Goebbels. Later, he visited Hitler and in a eulogy for the German leader published on May 7, 1945 - one day before surrender of the German occupation forces in Norway - Hamsun proclaimed, "He was a warrior, a warrior for mankind, and a prophet of the gospel of justice for all nations." After the war, due to a finding that Hamsun was in mental decline, efforts to prosecute him for treason were dropped (though he was heavily fined). Nonetheless, his reply to the diagnosis "permanently weakened mental faculties" was to write his first book since 1936, "On overgrown paths" (1949), where he ironizes his supposedly "weakened mental faculties".
In 2009, the Queen of Norway presided over the gala launching of a year long programme of commemorations of the 150th anniversary of the author's birth. On August 4, 2009 a Knut Hamsun Center (Hamsunsenteret) was opened in Presteid, Hamarøy island.
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