Photo © Marie Sjøvold
Download portrait (high-res)Author · b. 1956–2025
Ingvar Ambjørnsen
Ingvar Ambjørnsen (1956–2025) is considered to be one of the great storytellers of contemporary Norwegian literature. Since his literary debut in 1981, Ambjørnsen has written a great number of novels, collections of short stories as well as essay collections, and several books for children and young readers.
Over the span of his career, he has won numerous awards, including the Riverton Prize, the Brage Prize Honorary Prize, the Norwegian Booksellers’ Award and the Aschehoug Prize. Ingvar Ambjørnsen has been published in 30 countries. Several of his novels have successful films and theatre adaptions. The movie Elling, based on Ambjørnsen’s novels The Chicken Dance and Beyond the Great Indoors, was nominated to an Oscar in 2001. - The play Elling has appeared on stage in theatres around Europe to great acclaim.
Ambjørnsen’s books are often characterized by powerful, realistic descriptions of the seamier side of life. The protagonists tend to be outsiders – described with sympathetic insight and warmth. Loneliness and friendship are expressed in a concise literary style. His break-through novel from 1986, White Trash (Hvite niggere), is an excellent example of this. It is a crass exposure of the plight of that unfortunate soul seeking out an existence in sub-cultures.
Still, most readers will know Ambjørnsen’s work through a quartet of novels about the odd-ball Elling. A Vision of Paradise (Utsikt til paradiset) from 1993, The Chicken Dance (Fugledansen) from 1995, Beyond the Great Indoors (Brødre i blodet) from 1996 and Love Me Tomorrow (Elsk meg i morgen) from 1999 established Ambjørnsen as one of the most widely read Norwegian authors in the past few decades, with over half a million copies in print.
