Norway: Siltanews – News Desk
A hugely influential novelist and critic, Solstad won the Norwegian Critics prize three times, and his work was translated by Haruki Murakami.
Dag Solstad, a towering figure of Norwegian letters admired by literary greats around the world, has died aged 83.
Known for prose combining existential despair, political subjects and a droll sense of humour, Solstad won the Norwegian critics prize for literature an unprecedented three times.
A perennial contender for the Nobel prize in literature, Solstad was translated into Japanese by Haruki Murakami, and US author Lydia Davis taught herself Norwegian by reading his 400-page “Telemark novel” (full title: The Insoluble Epic Element in Telemark in the Years 1592–1896).
Karl Ove Knausgård admired his “old-fashioned elegance”; Per Petterson called him “Norway’s bravest, most intelligent novelist”. In an essay for the Paris Review, Damion Searls likened Solstad to the John Lennon of Norwegian letters: “the experimentalist, the ideas man.”
Born in the Sandefjord municipality in south-eastern Norway in 1941, Solstad began his writing career as a journalist for a local newspaper, before taking up short fiction aged 23.
A former member of the Maoist Communist party of Norway, he described himself in recent years as a “political amateur”, but also stated on his 80th birthday that he would like to be remembered as a communist.