Norway
Norway’s eccentric royals make Britain’s look mundane
It’s not hard to see why the 93-year-old, wheelchair-bound Princess Astrid of Norway might feel that now is the moment…
A winter’s tale: Brightly Shining, by Ingvild Rishoi, reviewed
In a poignant story reminiscent of ‘The Little Match Girl’, two Norwegian children try to dodge social services by selling wreaths and Christmas trees when their father fails to provide for them
A dark satanic cult: The Third Realm, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, reviewed
Knausgaard’s unsettling novel continues to explore previous themes in the series, including the strange phenomenon of the black metal music scene in socially balanced Norway
The cast mistake screaming for comedy: Cockfosters, at Turbine Theatre, reviewed
The Turbine Theatre is a newish venue beneath the railway arches of Grosvenor Bridge in Battersea. The comfy auditorium is…
We must never lose the treasured Orkneys
Fertile fields and spectacular sea stacks are matched by an extraordinarily rich, dramatic history. No wonder the islands have been so celebrated for centuries
Why did Jon Fosse win the Nobel Prize for literature? It’s baffling.
If Jon Fosse’s novels are experimental, they are experiments in exhausting banality, says Philip Hensher
Rising star
The second volume of Knausgaard’s trilogy serves as a prequel to the first, tracing the origins of Norway’s ominous new celestial body
Norwegian wood
The Worst Person in the World is a Norwegian film that has made a big splash. To date, its star…
The ideology of madness
On the wooden jetty from which the ferry used to depart for the little island of Utoya, there stood for…
Unkindly light
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle sequence is one of this century’s great projects: an intimate epic in which the overriding…
Kings of Convenience: Peace or Love
Grade: A– The problem with Norwegians is that they are so relentlessly, mind-numbingly pleasant. Well, OK, not Knut Hamsun or…
Does the SNP really want to copy Norway’s gender revolution?
Five years ago, in June 2016, Norway allowed anyone to change their legal gender. Legislative Decree 71 was everything that…
Prize wide open
Betraying the Nobel opens with a detonation from Michael Nobel, Alfred’s great-grandnephew. The vice-chairman and then chairman of the Nobel…
Time to crush China’s Arctic influence
Eyes are opening to the evil of the authoritarian Chinese regime that represses its people, genocides entire cultures, and influences…
If you’re tired of hygge then you’ll like Harald Sohlberg
If you’re tired of hygge then you’ll like Harald Sohlberg. The Norwegian painter eschewed the cosy fireside for the great…
An island’s dark secrets: The Tempest, by Steve Sem-Sandberg, reviewed
‘I should not have gone back to the island but I did it all the same.’ So begins the Swedish…
Who was the Isdal Woman? And how did she die?
‘Close your eyes and be absorbed by the storytelling,’ urged Jon Manel (the new head of podcasting at BBC World…
Norway is hard on migrants – but tough love works
When Angela Merkel invited refugees to Germany in 2015, tearing up the rules obliging migrants to seek asylum in the…
Speech therapy
Oslo opened in the spring of 2016 at a modest venue in New York. It moved to Broadway and this…
Norway’s noir
Valkyrien (C4, Sunday) is the hot new Scandi-noir series, which is being billed as Norway’s answer to Breaking Bad. In…
Northern lights
‘The only use of a gentleman in travelling,’ Emmeline Lowe wrote in 1857, ‘is to take care of the luggage.’…
The power of song
You might not think that the Eurovision Song Contest (screened live from Stockholm tonight) could have any connection with how…
Long life
Apart from the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, I’ve never known what my human rights are…
Greedy greenies
‘We have a problem. Yes. At the wind farm.’ Any conspiracy thriller with lines like that has definitely got my…
Wonderful waffle
It is hard to explain the contents of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s vast series My Struggle because not much happens. Or…
