Knut Hamsun

Who is Knut Hamsun?

Knut Hamsun, born Knud Pedersen in Lom, Norway, was a novelist whose psychological realism and stream-of-consciousness techniques profoundly influenced twentieth-century literature. Raised in poverty in northern Norway, he worked many jobs and spent time in the United States before achieving breakthrough success with his novel Hunger (Sult, 1890), a raw first-person account of a starving young writer's mind. He championed the inner life of the individual against the naturalistic conventions of his day, and is often cited as an influence on writers such as Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka and Ernest Hemingway. His epic novel Growth of the Soil (Markens Grøde), celebrating rural pioneer life, earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. In his later years Hamsun became deeply controversial for his sympathies with Nazi Germany during the wartime occupation of Norway, which severely damaged his public reputation, though his literary influence endured.

Sources: Knut Hamsun, Hunger (Sult), 1890 · Knut Hamsun, Growth of the Soil (Markens Grøde), 1917 · Nobel Prize in Literature 1920 (nobelprize.org)