Johan Bojer

Johan Bojer was a popular Norwegian novelist and dramatist. He principally wrote about the lives of the poor farmers and fishermen, both in his native Norway and among the Norwegian immigrants in the United States. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times.

Bojer was born Johan Kristoffer Hansen in the village of Ørkedalsøren, now the town of Orkanger, Sør-Trøndelag county. The son of unmarried parents—Hans Christophersen Bojer and Johanna Iversdatter Elgaaen—he grew up as a foster child in a poor family living in Rissa near Trondheim, Norway. Bojer learned early the realities of poverty. His early years were spent working on a farm and working as a bookkeeper. After the death of his father in 1894, he took the surname Bojer.

His literary work began with the publication of Unge tanker in 1893, and continued to gather strength through the 1920s. Because of the range of topics he addressed, he won critical acclaim in Norway. He gained international fame after many of his works were published in foreign languages. Critics generally recognize his best work to be his novel, Den siste viking, (English title: The Last of the Vikings). This novel powerfully and realistically depicts the lives of fishermen from Trøndelag, who spend the winter fishing in the Lofoten island archipelago within the Arctic Circle near the far north coast of Norway.

Bojer is best remembered for The Emigrants, a major novel dealing with the motivations and trials of Norwegians emigrated on the plains of North Dakota. In 1923, Bojer journeyed to Litchville, North Dakota, to research the lives of the Norwegian immigrants who had settled there. The result of his visit became a novel originally published in Norway as Vor egen stamme.