Norwegian writer Dag Solstad dies 83 years old | Books

Dag Solstad, an imposing figure in Norwegian letters admired by great literary people in the world, died at the age of 83.

Known for prose combining existential despair, political subjects and a sense of funny humor, Solstad won the Norwegian criticism’s literature prize three times unprecedented.

A sustainable content for the Nobel Prize for Literature, Solstad was translated into Japanese by Haruki Murakami, and the American author Lydia Davis taught Norwegian by reading her 400-page “Telemark novel” (full title: The epic insoluble element in Télemark in the years 1592-1896).

Karl Ove Knausgård admired his “old -fashioned elegance”; Per Petterson called him “the most courageous and intelligent novelist in Norway”. In a Essay for the Paris reviewDamion Searls compared Solstad to the John Lennon of Norwegian letters: “The experimentalist, the man of ideas”.

Born in the municipality of Sandefjord in southeast Norway in 1941, Solstad began his writer’s career as a journalist for a local newspaper, before taking a short fiction at the age of 23.

Former member of the Maoist Communist Party of Norway, he described himself in recent years as a “political amateur“, But also told his 80th anniversary that he would like us to remember him as a communist.

Politics has enabled part of his prose, such as Armand V of 2006, on a diplomat that rises in the ranks of the Norwegian Foreign Office and noding with American politics.

The main concerns of his 18 novels, stories, pieces and essays, however, were more personal, frequently presenting difficult father relationships. In a Guardian review, the British writer Geoff Dyer compared his characters as alive “as Philip Larkin could have done so if he had a job in Telemark instead of Hull”.

With the crime writer Jon Michelet, Solstad Also wrote five books on the world football cups between 1982 and 1998.

Solstad died Friday evening after a short stay in hospital, reported the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten. His wife Therese Bjørneboe was with him when he died.

Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre told NTB broadcaster that Solstad was one of the most important Norwegian authors of all time. “His work will continue to commit and inspire new readers.