Roy Jacobsen

Norwegian writer Roy Jacobsen (1954) debuted in 1982 with his short story collection Fangelov (Prison life). By then, Jacobsen knew what he was talking about: he grew up in a suburb of Oslo and in his teens became a member of a criminal gang. The police arrested him when he was 16 and he was placed in solitary confinement for 35 days. Since 1990 Jacobsen is fulltime writer with an oeuvre consisting of short stories, novels and children’s books. Currently he is considered one of Norway’s most important writers. His The Invisibles (2013), a book about Norway island culture and the chronicle of the Barrøy family living on an island carrying the family name, was published in more than twenty countries. It’s the first of a four part series with the island off the coast of Norway as backdrop. ‘Nobody can leave an island’, Jacobsen writes in The Invisibles. ‘An Island is a cosmos in a nutshell, where the stars sleep in the grass under the snow.’