Knut Hamsun

Knut Hamsun (1859 to 1952) was a Norwegian writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920, whose career spanned more than 70 years and produced more than 23 novels along with poetry, short stories, plays, a travelogue, and essays. He pioneered psychological literature through techniques of stream of consciousness and interior monologue in works such as Hunger (1890), Mysteries (1892), Pan (1894), and Victoria (1898), rejecting the era's realism and naturalism in favor of describing the intricacies of the human mind, and he influenced later writers including Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, and Ernest Hemingway. His later Nordland novels turned toward Norwegian rural life, local dialect, irony, and humour. Hamsun was also an open supporter of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany during the German occupation of Norway, for which he was charged with treason after the war and, though not convicted because of his age and mental state, was heavily fined in 1948.