Hamsun, Knut (1859–1952)

Norwegian novelist. His first novel Sult/Hunger (1890) was largely autobiographical. Other works include Pan (1894) and Markens grøde/The Growth of the Soil (1917). He was the first of many European and American writers to attempt to capture ‘the unconscious life of the soul’. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920. His hatred of capitalism made him sympathize with Nazism and he was fined in 1946 for collaboration.

Hamsun attacked the established ‘realistic’ writers such as Henrik Ibsen and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, maintaining that a subjective, irrational approach revealed more of the true nature of an individual.

Life Hamsun was born in Lom, Jotunheim. After years of struggling to survive by manual work in Norway and the USA, he burst into the literary world with Sult and a new conception of literature. However, the end of Hamsun's life was embittered by ill feeling rising from his support of the Nazi party during the German occupation 1940–45 (on which he comments in the autobiographical På gjengrodde stier/On Overgrown Paths 1949). He has since been recognized as a writer of genius, with a profound influence on modern European tradition.

Work His early novels Mysterier/Mysteries (1892) and Pan (1894) are fascinating pictures of a man at odds with himself and the world, and also reveal an intense feeling for nature, particularly that of his native Nordland. Markens grøde is now considered a less central work. His later novels, of which the most important is the ‘August’ trilogy (1927–33), feature the same rootless individual of his early works, but now ageing and disillusioned, and there is a stronger element of social criticism.