Sigrid Undset

Undset was born in Denmark but raised in Norway after her father, an archaeologist, moved the family there; his early death left them in genteel poverty, and she worked for a decade as a secretary at an engineering firm in Kristiania before her writing earned her a living. She married the painter Anders Castus Svarstad, who had three children from an earlier marriage, and drew on the demands of running a large blended household even as she researched medieval Norway with a historian's rigor for Kristin Lavransdatter.

Her 1924 conversion to Roman Catholicism, unusual and controversial in solidly Lutheran Norway, deepened the novel's medieval Catholic texture. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928. When Germany invaded Norway in 1940 she fled into exile in the United States after her son was killed fighting the Germans, campaigning abroad against Nazism until she returned home in 1945; she died in Norway in 1949.