Knut Hamsun

Knut Hamsun (1859–1952) was a Norwegian writer best known for Growth of the Soil, the novel that won him the 1920 Nobel Prize in Literature, and for Hunger, Mysteries and Pan. He argued that fiction should explore the workings of the human mind, and his early novels helped pioneer psychological writing. His later Nordland novels turned to everyday rural life in Norway. During the German occupation he openly backed Hitler and Nazi Germany, and after the war he was charged with treason and in 1948 fined.