Niels Fredrik Dahl

Rationale: 

Niels Fredrik Dahl has a large and distinctive body of work behind him. Since his debut in 1988, he has distinguished himself as both a novelist and a poet. In 2017, he released his fifth novel Mor om natten, and in 2023 he followed this up with another highlight – Fars rygg (in English: “Father’s Back”). 

  The Swedish author Walter Lundquist opens his novel Nycklar till okänt rum from 1950 with the following sentence: “Something remains within me, in a feeling of deep homelessness I remember (...)” This captivating, wide-open quote could easily be placed as an epigraph for Fars rygg. 

  One of the characteristics that defines Dahl’s writing is the combination of what we might call a nervous presence and an utterly incomparable ability to create imagery. In Dahl’s work, linguistic precision isn’t defined by syntactic reduction, but rather by allowing the text to approach materiality with a strange anxiety, a peculiar respect for what it will uncover. Dahl allows the words, sentences, and paragraphs to carefully find their way towards what gradually forms the substance of the novel. Sometimes the text is lingering and hesitant, sometimes immediate and hurried, always with a clear recognition of what language can evoke in both emotion and reason.  

  Fars rygg is a rich and poignant novel. It’s precisely through his restlessness, his desire to illuminate and understand the story through the web of his own, singular, and fragile experiences, and the shared, almost overwhelming events in the world we all relate to that Dahl also welcomes the reader into an open and multifaceted narrative freed from a specific literary method. The narrative portrayal is allowed to find its own intricate path through the life and human conditions that the novel reveals with sorrow and sympathy, until it closes, “until father is just like a fleck of light on the retina.”