Cora Sandel

Cora Sandel was the pen name of Sara Cecilia Görvell Fabricius, a Norwegian writer and painter who lived most of her adult life abroad. Her best-known works are the novels now known as the Alberta Trilogy. She was born in Kristiania (now Oslo) in 1880, but moved to Tromsø in northern Norway when she was 12 years old. She showed an early interest in art and literature, and studied painting under Harriet Backer in Kristiania. In 1906, she moved to Paris to pursue her artistic career, and became part of the Scandinavian artist colony there. She married the Swedish sculptor Anders Jönsson in 1913, and gave birth to their son Erik in 1917. She started writing short stories and sketches for Norwegian newspapers, but did not publish her first novel, Alberte and Jakob, until 1926, under the pseudonym Cora Sandel. The novel was the first part of the semi-autobiographical Alberta Trilogy, which follows the life of a sensitive and aspiring female artist from her childhood in Tromsø to her adulthood in Paris. The trilogy is considered one of the major works of Norwegian literature in the 20th century, and explores themes such as gender, class, identity, and freedom. Sandel also wrote five collections of short stories, which often deal with the same topics as her novels, but with more humor and irony. She was praised for her elegant and expressive style, and her keen psychological insight. She lived in Sweden from 1921 until her death in 1974, and received several literary awards and honors, including the Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav in 1957. She was also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1963.