Per Petterson was born in Oslo in 1952 and worked for several years as an unskilled labourer and a bookseller. He has received the prestigious Nordic Council Literature Prize and, on multiple occasions, the Brage Prize, the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature and the Booksellers' Best Book of the Year Award for his many celebrated novels, such as In the Wake, I Curse the River of Time and I Refuse. Petterson made his literary breakthrough in 2003 with Out Stealing Horses, which in English translation won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. It has been published in fifty languages and was an international bestseller.
Petterson's spare and deliberate prose has astonishing force * The New Yorker * Petterson is a profoundly gifted novelist -- Richard Ford 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 * Petterson is remarkably gifted -- James Wood Reading a Petterson novel is like falling into a northern landscape painting-all shafts of light and clear palpable chill * Time *