Johan Borgen

Johan Borgen was one of the most important and versatile writers of 20th-century Norway. He was born into a bourgeois family, but he was often considered a radical leftist in his views. He started his career as a journalist and a critic, writing under the pseudonym Mumle Gåsegg. He also translated books from different languages and genres. During the Nazi occupation of Norway, he wrote against the regime and was arrested and sent to a concentration camp. He later escaped and continued his resistance work. After the liberation, he became a cultural editor and a stage director. He also wrote novels, short stories, plays, and essays. His best-known work is the novel Lillelord, which is the first part of a trilogy that depicts the life of a young man from the upper-middle class in Norway from 1917 to 1945. The trilogy won him the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature in 1955 and the Nordic Council's Literature Prize in 1967. He also won other awards such as the Gyldendal's Endowment and the Booksellers' Prize. He died of cancer in 1979. He was married to novelist Annemarta Evjenth Borgen and had three children, one of whom became a writer as well.