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Johan Harstad is a Norwegian author, graphic designer, playwright, drummer, and international sensation. He is the winner of the 2008 Brage Award (Brageprisen), previously won by Per Petterson, and his books have been published in over eleven countries. In 2009, he was named the first ever in-house playwright at the National Theatre in Oslo. His first novelBuzz Aldrin, What Happened To You In All The Confusion, originally published in Norway by Gyldendal in 2005, was made into a TV series in 2009 starringThe Wire's Chad Coleman. Harstad lives in Oslo. David Smithgrew up outside of Atlanta and studied English and philosophy at the University of Georgia. He then earned a Master's Degree in the Humanities from the University of Chicago. After Chicago, a lifelong interest in his family's Nordic heritage brought him to Norway. He took language classes at the University of Oslo, before settling in Bergen and starting to work as a commercial translator. In 2014, he earned a National Translator Accreditation from the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research. He is a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison
"Praise for Johan Harstad: ""Like Jonathan Safran Foer, Harstad combines formal play and linguistic ferocity with a searing emotional directness.""--Dedi Felman, Words Without Borders ""The fact is that Johan Harstad has a wholly unique voice, simultaneously both concrete and soaring . . . to be able to write in this way, to conjure a situation and construct space and time around it with such linguistic fluency, cannot be learned. You are born with it. Harstad's fellow countryman Knut Hamsun, who was able to do the same, must be rejoicing in his heaven or wherever he might be.""--Jakob Levinsen, Jyllands-Posten review"
