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Erik Fosnes Hansen

Erik Fosnes Hansen is a Norwegian author who made his debut at age twenty with the novel Falketårnet. His most famous work is his second novel, Psalm at Journey's End, which in separate but steadily more interwoven stories follows the individual musicians that end their careers and lives at Titanic. The book has been translated into more than twenty languages. A Part II follow-up to Beretninger om beskyttelse (Tales of Protection) has been announced but is not yet completed.

Fosnes Hansen has also published poetry, and is a frequent contributor to contemporary public cultural debate.


“La Ciencia es la Luz, (..) Trae ilustración y conocimiento a la gente que antes vivía en la oscuridad. Para que las colecciones de arte, las curiosidades y las casas de fieras pudieran llegar a ser útil, y no solo diversión.”
Erik Fosnes Hansen
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“Everyone chats and smiles, chats about nothing, shouts and drinks themselves silly occasionally or all the time. They they die one fine day, old or young, they die, tucked up into the earth. That's what it's like. Swarming lives, with no meaning, no number.”
Erik Fosnes Hansen
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“He looked at her as if she were already one of the ugly nameless bodies in the mortuary, and with a medical man's sober, somewhat cynical mind, he saw her in front of him, stripped and sliced open. That was his revenge. He caught himself regarding the whole world in that way.”
Erik Fosnes Hansen
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“I never really had any God at all, just an imagined one, an inherited ghost.”
Erik Fosnes Hansen
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“When night falls people become as lonely as snowflakes floating down from a gray city sky. Now and again we fall past a streetlamp and are visible, a brief moment apart, REAL-- we can be seen. We exist. Then we vanish into the gray darkness and the earth draws us to it.”
Erik Fosnes Hansen
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“How can all the small insects simultaneously know, without a brain, without knowing anything, that today they should visit this meadow, tomorrow that one? It's a question of knowing without knowing, and wanting without wanting. If you want something too intensely, things fall apart in your hands. You start to doubt everything. As soon as you let go, everything comes to you. Then you know, without knowing.”
Erik Fosnes Hansen
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