Knut Hamsun

Knut Hamsun founded the modernist and postmodernist novel at once, writes James Wood in his introduction to this seminal work by a Nobel Prize-winning writer who has been recognised as one of the greatest literary figures of the twentieth century. A young man called John Nagel arrives to spend a summer in a small Norwegian coastal town, a stranger in...

Victoria is among Knut Hamsun's best-loved works—an incisive study of the coercive power of economic and social forces that is also renowned for its innovative and psychologically probing narrative techniques. Hamsun stages in riveting detail the ill-fated relationship between the novel's hero, Johannes, and the eponymous Victoria. When Victoria is driven to make a financially advantageous marriage to the son...

A modernist masterpiece: the Nobel Prize winner’s first and most important novelA Penguin Classic First published in Norway in 1890, Hunger probes the depths of consciousness with frightening and gripping power. Contemptuous of novels of his time and what he saw as their stereotypical plots and empty characters, Knut Hamsun embarked on “an attempt to describe the strange, peculiar life...

It was at the time when I was wandering around hungry in Kristiania, that strange city no one leaves before it has set its mark on them... Hunger is the first-person story of a young man desperately trying to establish himself in the city as a writer, living in shabby lodgings where he can seldom afford to pay the rent,...