The Norwegian writer Niels Fredrik Dahl has won the Nordic Council Literature Prize (also known by the English term Nordisk Råds Litteraturpris) with the novel Fars rygg (“Walking Man”), published in his home country by Oktober, which we are thrilled to represent in Italy on behalf of Oslo Literary Agency!
Established in 1962, the Nordic Council is the most important award given each year to a work written in a Nordic language.
We are particularly excited because this is the second time in a few years that this recognition has been awarded to a text we represent. In 2022, the winner was indeed Solvej Balle with The Volume of Time, a series of novels published in over twenty countries and here by NN Editore.
THE BOOK:
Taking old documents, letters, and photographs as a starting point, the narrator seeks to reconstruct the story of his deceased father’s childhood. It is an extraordinary yet cold childhood, marked by loneliness, dreams, and desire: in Egypt, where the boy’s father, the Judge, keeps his wife and young son in a tight colonial grip; in a stranger’s house in a suburb of Oslo; in a boarding school in Geneva, and in hotel rooms across Europe, as the continent heads towards another great war. Tender, dark, and at the same time full of humor, Fars rygg is an unforgettable portrait of a boy’s and a young man’s struggle to live in a world he does not understand, yet seeks to be a part of, the people around him, and the fateful time in which he grew up. It is also the story of the boy’s mother, desperate and filled with longing. Niels Fredrik Dahl has written a compelling novel about family and love in the 20th century, about a boy and a mother bound by loneliness, and about a solitude passed down from generation to generation.
