The award is decided by all booksellers across the country. Each year, every bookseller has the opportunity to nominate their favourite book published across all genres that year for the prize, and the ten most voted for make up to list of nominees. This year over 100 titles were suggested as nominees. From the ten nominated books, each bookseller will vote again to decide the winner, which will be announced November 14th.
Vigdis Hjorth won The Bookseller Award in 2016, for her massive breakthrough with Will and Testament. This was also her international breakthrough, and since 2016 she has been nominated to prestigious international awards like US National Book Award (2021) and The International Booker Prize (2023). Repetition has received rave reviews, and critics are calling it Hjorth's best novel yet.
Nadia Ansar is nominated with her debut non-fiction book, My Shame. In 2021 Ansar's husband Abid Raja published his book My Guilt, which won The Bookseller Award. My Shame is the sister book to My Guilt, where she gets to tell her own side of the story in her own voice. My Shame debuted to great reviews, and the book has been called 'important' and 'universal'.
Repetition by Vigdis Hjorth
Will and Testament meets Fifteen Years in this new novel by Vigdis Hjorth.
She is a grown woman going for a walk in the dark woods, with her safe dog. She’s also a sixteen-year-old. The view the grown woman offers her younger self, is tender and beautiful. It’s about being kissed for the first time, the incredibly clumsy, funny, and painful act of doing it for the first time, it’s about feeling the intoxication spread throughout your body at a party with some boys in a terraced house, about running through the woods to prepare for a marathon, about feeling a huge hunger and thirst in your young life.
All while her mother watches over the young girl like a hawk, her father keeps away and holds a low profile. The father’s distance is notable, the mother’s close watch involves control that is normally unheard of. Because, as the novel reveals on its first page, there is a big and dangerous secret in their house.
Sample translation and synopsis available.
My Shame by Nadia Ansar
Nadia Ansar was named after the Romanian gymnast Nadia Comăneci. She was the symbol of the “perfect 10”; unattainable, flawless, and perfect. On the outside she was the immaculate daughter, the good immigrant and the well-integrated psychologist, an expert in feelings such as shame and guilt. What no one could see was that she carried with her a heavy rucksack of shame and dark secrets.
Through the book My Shame she now wishes to use her own personal and professional voice to tell the story about the talented minority girl’s fight to be able to be herself. About growing up in Oslo as the daughter of the local grocer and the only girl in her school class with a minority background. About her dad’s breakneck split between the equal Norwegian society and the patriarchal expectations of their culture. About the fight for equality in her marriage, after marrying the love of her life.