Winner of the 2024 Nordic Council Literature Prize

A son is trying to understand his father through the letters, drawings, and pictures left behind: “I’m looking for my father. He’s been dead for fourteen years now, and yet I’m still looking for him.” "Fars rygg" is a novel that demonstrates how loneliness is passed down from generation to generation, and how difficult - almost impossible - it is to come to terms with what fundamentally shapes a life and a story. Central to the novel is the father’s father, the Judge, the despotic focal point of the family. The novel spans several decades and continents, and is inextricably linked with both war history and colonial history, while also demonstrating how the gaps in memory and the loose threads are all we have to relate to when we seek to form an image of the past. 

This year’s winner of the Nordic Council Literature Prize has written a powerful yet subdued novel about approaching the blind spots in one’s own origins, and thus also the formation of one’s own identity. It’s a both tender and unsettling attempt to shed light on and understand the fabric of our own, singular, and fragile experiences, and the shared, almost overwhelming events in the world we all relate to. With this year’s winner "Fars rygg", Niels Fredrik Dahl, has delivered a deeply probing and highly unique novel about lost time and the conditions of longing.