Jan Kjærstad
The Discoverer

The Discoverer
Winner of the 2001 Nordic Council Literature Award

The Discoverer concludes the trilogy about Jonas Wergeland’s eventful life. It is a book full of episodic tales, but most of all it is a story about landscapes and what lies behind the things we see – be it Moscow’s magnificent metro stations, Chinese burial chambers or the fabulous treasure troves of the imagination.

“an enormously ambitious undertaking about an enormously ambitious man – and, beyond him, about ambition itself and humanity’s ambiguous need for it … a work so ample in its riches that further discoveries are inevitable.”
(Paul Binding, Independent, UK)

“No Scandinavian literary work emerging in the last ten years can come up against the height, width or depth of Jan Kjærstad’s hyper-trilogy about TV-phenomenon, wife murderers and genious of thought Jonas Wergeland”
(Weekendavisen)

Jan Kjærstad

Jan Kjærstad occupies a prominent place in contemporary Norwegian literature. He has a master‘s degree in theology from the University of Oslo, and he made his debut as a writer of fiction in 1980 with Kloden dreier stille rundt, a collection of short stories. He has written a number of novels and short stories and he has published picture books and essays. In 1984 he received the Norwegian Literary Critics Association’s Prize for Homo Falsus, or the Perfect Murder. The fact that he was honored with Germany’s prestigious Henrik Steffens Prize in 1998, awarded to Scandinavians who have significantly enriched Europe’s artistic and intellectual life, also illustrates his international appeal as an author. His trilogy The Seducer (1993), The Conquerer (1996) and The Inventer (1999) makes a monumental contribution towards renewal of the art of novel writing in Scandinavia.