Knut Hamsun

Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) was a Norwegian novelist born in Lom, Gudbrandsdalen, who gained international acclaim with his 1890 breakthrough novel Hunger, pioneering modernist psychological literature with stream-of-consciousness techniques that influenced Kafka and Hemingway. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920 for his monumental work Growth of the Soil, but controversially supported Nazi Germany during WWII, leading to postwar treason charges from which he was fined but not imprisoned due to age.