Per Petterson was born in Oslo in 1952 and worked for several years as an unskilled labourer and a bookseller. He made his literary breakthrough in 2003 with the prizewinning novel Out Stealing Horses, which has been published in fifty languages and won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.
His eerily terse prose luxuriates in the hazy strangeness of the Danish landscape and is particularly brilliant at nailing adolescence as an inchoate, restless state in which life is felt much more fiercely than it is understood. -- Claire Allfree * Mail on Sunday * It packs a powerful punch... A clear-cut jewel of nameless dread and nagging anxiety: Scandinavian gloom par excellence. -- Andrew Van Loon * Sunday Telegraph * Petterson is remarkably gifted -- James Wood * New Yorker * Is there a living writer better at conveying the disconcerting relationship between time and memory?... There is pleasure, too, in watching Petterson shift through the gears from pleasure to unease in one of those gloriously sinuous sentences that have become something of a trademark -- Adrian Turpin * Financial Times * A compelling mix of fable with the day-to-day account of a working-class boy... It is hard to think of a novel that so precisely and vividly conveys the pain and disorientation of puberty -- John Burnside * Guardian *