Norway’s literary world was mourning the death this week of essayist and author Dag Solstad at the age of 83. Solstad won a long list of awards, his works were translated into 40 languages and his publisher called him one of the entire Nordic area’s greatest authors of all time.
“It’s impossible to think of Norwegian literature without Dag Solstad,” Ingeri Engelstad, head of Solstad’s publishing firm, Forlaget Oktober, told newspaper VG. Engelstad confirmed that Solstad died following a heart attack Friday night and after a short hospital stay.
VG also reported that Solstad’s widow Therese Bjørneboe, herself the daughter of the late and legendary Norwegian author Jens Bjørneboe, was at his side when he died. The couple continued to live in their flat filled with books in Oslo’s Skillebekk area, where Solstad was a familiar figure.
“His books have enthused and surprised readers for 60 years,” Engelstad told VG, adding that he was a “powerful epicenter” for Forlaget Oktober who “continued to renew his style and genre again and again.”
Among books many Norwegians have cited as their favorite is a novel about a politically active teacher in the Norwegian coastal town of Larvik in the early 1970s (Gymnaslærer Pedersen…) which was turned into a film. Many of his nearly 30 other books showed up on their lists of his books that are said to have gone through four distinct phases of his authorship: Modernist, realistic, self-apologetic and several with himself as a character. Solstad is also fondly remembered for teaming up with another later Norwegian author, Jon Michelet, in writing about football, particularly the World Cup in 1998.
He was politically active himself and a member of the Workers’ Communist Party during the 1970s. He was born in 1941 into a merchant family in the historic whaling town of Sandefjord, about a two-hour drive southwest of Oslo. He worked as a teacher and journalist before enrolling at the University of Oslo and beginning to write short stories.
He started out working for literary magazines but soon began writing novels, the first of which was published in 1969. Solstad went on to win many of the Nordic region’s biggest prizes, including the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize in 1989 for Roman 1987, Norway’s Brage Prize in 2006 for Armand V and Norway’s own literary critics’ prize three times. He also won the Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize for his overall authorship. Some of his fans were lamenting the fact that he never won the Nobel Prize in literature, which many believed was highly deserved.
International audiences discovered him late in his life, with the New Yorker magazine finally lauding his work in 2015 as one of the world’s great authors and again in 2021. He kept writing until he fell ill just a few weeks ago, and published a new book about horse trotting in February. In his last interview with VG, also conducted in February, he claimed that growing old can be “a wonderful experience.” Funeral arrangements were pending.
NewsinEnglish.no/Nina Berglund