Hamsun, Knut

Norwegian novelist. His first novel Sult/Hunger (1890) was largely autobiographical. Other works include Pan (1894) and Markens grøde/The Growth of the Soil (1917). He was the first of many European and American writers to attempt to capture ‘the unconscious life of the soul’. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920. His hatred of capitalism made him sympathize with Nazism and he was fined in 1946 for collaboration.

Hamsun attacked the established ‘realistic’ writers such as Henrik Ibsen and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, maintaining that a subjective, irrational approach revealed more of the true nature of an individual.