This is the third time Hjorth has received the Critics' Award, an honour she shares with only one other author, Dag Solstad. Her previous wins are for Long Live the Post Horn! (2012) and Will and Testament (2017). Additionally, Hjorth won the Critics' Award for best children's novel with Jørgen + Anne is true (1985).

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.

Jury's Statement

The best adult fiction title of 2023 is REPETITION by Vigdis Hjorth, and with this, she has won the prize for the third time (additionally, Hjorth has received the Norwegian Critics' Award for the children’s book "Jørgen + Anne = true"). She has now received the prize for adult fiction as many times as Dag Solstad, and we are now at a tie between these two friends.

The first time Hjorth won the Critics' Award was with the novel “Long Live the Post Horn” in 2012, when it was said that the author was in top shape. The second time she won, was with the novel “Will and Testament” and then it was said that her spiritual healing as writer was equally in top shape.

With this year’s prize-winning novel “Repetition”, we can conclude that Hjorth repeats herself in amazing, soul-shaking and shattering ways. With her literary-archeological excavations, it’s as if she is working with increasingly softer brushes, working her way downwards and inwards through the soul’s depths, and her findings become clearer and clearer to the reader.

And so, Hjorth touches an increasing number of readers in all ages. Hjorth whips, consoles, and embraces her characters and readers alike. We are many who did not so much fell tears as have our tears thrust upon us, reading “Repetition”. In the novel, she writes:

“There are no humans in any other place, just here, on this tiny, little planet, probably lots of intelligent life out there, but no humans, not in any of all the billions of galaxies, a rare and threatened species, and so cruel to one another.” 

Just like novels do not have a one-on-one relationship to reality, of course novels do not share a one-on-one-relationship to the readers’ experience. But the emotional and common experience Hjorth gives us, is one-on-one, and it makes “Repetition” an important novel for men and women of all ages who have experienced abuse and oppression.

Additionally, with “Repetition”, Hjorth manages to be open and discussing regarding the meta-reflections concerning the relationships that her books may or may not have to reality, and this in an artistic, philosophical, and literary elegant manner. Through both form and content, this novel engages actively in questions connected to truth and literary method.

This quote from the novel explains a lot:

“But the effect it had, my first fiction, and the terror it brought, taught me something crucial: that what we create, can have greater significance than what is true, and may be truer.”

The sixteen-year old girl in “Repetition” is a runner. A dancer must have inspired artist Sandra Blichert, for this year’s prize is one of her prints bearing the name “Ballerina legs”

On behalf of the members of the literary section, it is an honor and a pleasure to present our warmest congratulations to Vigdis Hjorth!