Johan Harstad | |
|---|---|
 Johan Harstad, 2009 | |
| Born | 10 February 1979 Stavanger, Norway |
| Nationality | Norwegian |
| Genre | Novels, short stories, plays, non-fiction |
Johan Harstad (born 10 February 1979) is a Norwegian novelist, short story writer, playwright and graphic designer. He lives in Oslo. [1]
Harstad was born in Stavanger. He made his literary debut in 2001, with a collection of short prose entitled Herfra blir du bare eldre ('From here on in you only get older'). The following year he published a collection of short stories called Ambulanse ('Ambulance') and 2005 saw the publication of his first novel, Buzz Aldrin, hvor ble det av deg i alt mylderet? ('Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?'). [1] The novel is mainly set in the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic Ocean. It deals with a person who, instead of trying to be best, decides to be second best in life, like his hero, Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the Moon. In 2009 the novel was made into a television series, starring Chad Coleman as well as other, well known Scandinavian actors, including Pål Sverre Valheim Hagen and Bjarne Henriksen. [2] Rights to the book have been sold to United States, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Germany, the Faroe Islands, Italy, Russia, Turkey, South Korea and France. [1] Demanding that the book be translated into English, an editor in the publishing house Simon & Schuster likened Harstad's work with that of Jonathan Safran Foer. [3] The book was published in English by Seven Stories Press in New York in June 2011, and was named a Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Title of 2011 and one of Electric Literature's Most Beautiful Books of the Year.
In 2007, Harstad published Hässelby , a novel about the children's book character Alfie Atkins' life as an adult, [4] who ultimately is held responsible for the end of the world. The novel is influenced by David Lynch's TV series Twin Peaks, the theory of Synchronicity and Arthur Koestler's book The Roots of Coincidence .
In 2008 he published his first sci-fi / horror novel, 172 Hours on the Moon , a crossover between young adult fiction and adult fiction. The novel, dealing with a return to the Moon in 2012 (2019 in the US edition), is partly a homage to sci-fi and horror films from the 1970s and 1980s. For DARLAH he was awarded the 2008 Brage Prize in the category children's literature. [4] The rights to the novel has been sold to United States, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Germany, the Faroe Islands, Turkey, South Korea, France, Mexico, Taiwan, Brasil and Serbia.
In 2015 he published Max-Mischa-Tetoffensiven, a more than a 1000 pages long novel centered around the life of the playwright and theatre director Max Hansen who moved from his native Norway to the U.S. as a teenager. The Dutch translation of this work was awarded the 2018 Europese Literatuur Prijs, [5] a prize for translated European literature.
Harstad was awarded the Dobloug Prize in 2019. [6]
Harstad is also a playwright, and four of his works was published in 2008 as Bsider ('B-sides'). In late 2008 Harstad was hired as an in-house playwright at the National Theatre of Norway, as the first to hold such a position. [7] During his time at the National Theatre he started working on an extensive two part play which was published in 2010 as Osv. ('Etc.'). The play, which in its Norwegian edition is over 500 pages long, is set in 1994 and centers around an American family whose relationship is falling apart. The father, a Vietnam War veteran, suffers a nervous breakdown more than two decades after his homecoming and moves into the park at Constitution Gardens in Washington D.C., next to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall. The daughter struggles in London, after the loss of her husband and the son is a war photographer, covering conflicts in Europe and Africa. The Bosnian War, the first Chechen war and the Rwandan genocide plays a big part in the play, both as a setting and as examples of growing conflicts in the mid-1990s. For this play, Harstad received, in 2014, the Norwegian Ibsen Award. [8] Also, he was nominated for another Brage Prize Award. [9]
In 2011 Harstad oversaw the first production of the complete Memoirs of a Breadman-trilogy at Black Box Teater in Oslo, a theater known for its focus on modern and contemporary theater. The plays are all a mix between comedy, tragedy and absurdism. The first part, Akapulco, takes place in a fictitious Swiss village in Mexico around 1920–1930. The second part, Ellis Iland is set in Manhattan between 1906 and 1917 and focus on two immigrants, a German man called Barker and a Ukrainian man called Stoklitsky, who struggles to make a life for themselves in the city. Barker is an accountant, but is forced by their landlady to work in the New York City sewer hunting alligators while Stoklitsky, who just happens to be tone deaf, tries to compose a symphony for theremins, containing only perfect fifths. The trilogy was one of three candidates for the 2012 Norwegian Ibsen Award. [10]
Though no official explanation has been given by the author, many of the geographical names in Harstad's plays are intentionally misspelled (e.g. Washingtin, Akapulco, Ellis Iland, Mattrhorn). In the Memoirs of a Breadman, references are also made to places such as Ithalia, Mexicoo, U.E.S.A, Zyrich, Miilano, Providense and Chikago.
In 2012 Harstad published his first non-fiction work, Blissard - A Book About Motorpsycho. The book is a mix between a biography of the Norwegian band Motorpsycho and their 1996 album Blissard, a personal account of the author's long time relationship with the band's music and his own teenage years. More than 140 pages of the books total of 330 is made up by footnotes, where Harstad expands on band trivia, details, digressions, literary detours and personal stories as well as including interviews with people affiliated with the band, poetry, reviews and newspaper clippings.
Henrik Johan Ibsen was a Norwegian playwright and theatre director. As one of the founders of modernism in theatre, Ibsen is often referred to as "the father of realism" and one of the most influential playwrights of his time, as well of one of the most influential playwrights in Western literature more generally. His major works include Brand, Peer Gynt, Emperor and Galilean, A Doll's House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, and When We Dead Awaken. Ibsen is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare, and A Doll's House was the world's most performed play in 2006.
Jon Olav Fosse is a Norwegian author, translator, and playwright. In 2023, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable."
Dag Solstad is a Norwegian novelist, short-story writer, and dramatist whose work has been translated into 20 languages. He has written nearly 30 books and is the only author to have received the Norwegian Literary Critics' Award three times.
Per Petterson is a Norwegian novelist. His debut book was Aske i munnen, sand i skoa (1987), a collection of short stories. He has since published a number of novels with good reviews. To Siberia (1996), set in the Second World War, was published in English in 1998 and nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize. I kjølvannet, translated as In the Wake (2002), is a young man's story of losing his family in the Scandinavian Star ferry disaster in 1990 ; it won the Brage Prize for 2000. His 2008 novel Jeg forbanner tidens elv won the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2009, with an English translation published in 2010.
Tor Åge Bringsværd is an author, playwright, editor and translator. He is perhaps best known for his speculative fiction. Together with long-time partner Jon Bing, he is also considered the first Norwegian author to write science fiction literature. Bringsværd regards himself as an anarchist, which is clearly reflected in some of his works. He is also known for his distinctive style of writing, for example for his seemingly random jumps to narratives or anecdotes with no clear relationship to the main story.
Øyvind Rimbereid is a Norwegian author and composer of lyric poetry. He has worked as an instructor at Skrivekunstakademiet in Bergen. Rimbereid holds a cand. philol. degree from the University of Bergen with high marks in Nordic languages and literature. He won the Brage Prize 2008 for his poetry collection Herbarium.
Jan Erik Vold is a Norwegian lyric poet, jazz vocal reciter, translator and author. He was a core member of the so-called "Profil generation", the circle attached to the literary magazine Profil. Throughout his career as an artist, he has had the ability to reach the public, both with his poetry and his political views. He has contributed greatly to the renewal of Norwegian poetry, and created interest in lyrical poetry. Jan Erik Vold is currently living in Stockholm.
The Brage Prize is a Norwegian literature prize that is awarded annually by the Norwegian Book Prize foundation. The prize recognizes recently published Norwegian literature.
Hanne Ørstavik is a Norwegian writer. She was born in Tana in Finnmark province in the far north of Norway, and moved to Oslo at the age of 16. With the publication of the novel Hakk (Cut) in 1994, Ørstavik embarked her writing career. Her literary breakthrough came three years later with the publication of Kjærlighet (Love), which in 2006 was voted the 6th best Norwegian book of the last 25 years in a poll published by Dagbladet. Since then she has written several novels and received a number of literary prizes.
Inger Elisabeth Hansen is a Norwegian poet and translator. She has been awarded the Dobloug Prize, the Brage Prize, and the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature. She was president of the Norwegian Writers' Union from 1997 to 1999.
Liv Køltzow is a Norwegian novelist, playwright, biographer and essayist.
Paal-Helge Haugen is a Norwegian poet, novelist, dramatist and children's writer who has published over 30 books. His titles have been translated into at least 20 languages. His 1968 "punktroman" or "pointillist novel," Anne, was the first in its genre and was soon considered a modern classic. In 2019, Hanging Loose Press published the first English translation of Anne], after Julia Johanne Tolo's translation of the book won the sixth annual Loose Translations Prize, jointly sponsored by Hanging Loose Press and the graduate writing program of Queens College, City University of New York.
Cecilie Løveid is a Norwegian novelist, poet, playwright, and writer of children's books.
Buzz Aldrin, What Happened To You in All The Confusion? is a novel by the Norwegian author Johan Harstad, published in 2005. The book deals with a thirty-year-old gardener, Mattias, near obsessed with the thought of being second best, the greatest number two, much to his girlfriend's grievance. He looks upon astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the Moon, as his role model, and tries to live up to what he thinks Aldrin would do in any given situation. He has an extraordinary talent as a singer, but refuses to become a singer in his friend's semi-famous band, arguing that "not everyone wants to be a leader, some just want to be the secretary. Not everyone wants to star in a movie, some just want to watch the movie." After losing both his girlfriend and his job, he accidentally ends up on the Faroe Islands, where he meets people with the same ideals as himself, living in a psychiatric halfway house. Using the lunar-like landscape of the Faroe Islands as a backdrop, the novel deals with their attempt at finding a balance between being second best and anonymous without going into total isolation.
DARLAH is a 2008 young adult science fiction/horror novel by Norwegian author Johan Harstad. The book was originally published in Norway on September 15, 2008 by Cappelen Damm, with an English language translation being published by Little, Brown in New York City on July 10, 2012. Rights to DARLAH have also been sold to sixteen other countries: Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Faroe Islands, France, the Netherlands, Germany, UK, Turkey, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Taiwan, South Korea, Mexico and Brazil. In 2008 Harstad's work on DARLAH won him a Brage Prize.
The Norwegian Ibsen Award is awarded to promote Norwegian drama and is awarded only to playwrights.
Gabriel Scott was a Norwegian poet, novelist, playwright and children's writer.
Osv. is a two-part play by Johan Harstad from 2010. It was published as a book on November 1, 2010, and was nominated for the Brage Prize the same year. With a length of just over 500 pages, it is among the longest plays ever published in Norway.
Olaug Nilssen is a Norwegian novelist, playwright, children's writer, essayist and magazine editor.
Mansour Koushan (Persian: منصور کوشان) was a prominent Iranian novelist, poet, playwright, editor and director. He received the Ossietzky Award in 2010 for his outstanding work for human rights and freedom of expression. He was an active member of Iranian Writers’ Association and a strong opponent to the Iranian regime. In December 1998 Koushan was invited by the Norwegian Forum for Freedom of Expression to deliver a speech at the 50th anniversary of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights Charter. Not long after, he received news that two of his friends and colleagues Mohammad Mokhtari and Mohammad-Ja'far Pouyandeh had been abducted and killed in Tehran. His name was likewise on the regimes death list. These killings were part of what is known as Chain Murders of Iran. Koushan was then forced to live in exile and resided in Norway the rest of his life.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Artists | |
| Other | |
