Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson

Bjørnson grew up a pastor's son in the Romsdal valleys and made himself the voice of a nation that did not yet have its own state: he wrote the poem that became Norway's national anthem, ran theaters in Bergen and Christiania to build a Norwegian stage, and campaigned all his life for independence from Sweden, achieved five years before his death.

His peasant tales of the 1850s and 60s (Synnøve Solbakken first among them) gave Norwegian prose a clean, saga-cadenced style, and his later social problem plays made him Ibsen's great rival and counterpart. The first Norwegian awarded the Nobel Prize, in 1903, he spent his final decades as Europe's resident conscience, firing off open letters on Dreyfus, minority rights, and peace until he died in Paris in 1910.