Norway's literary hero-turned-outcast Hamsun on coin: bank
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Norway's literary hero-turned-outcast Hamsun on coin: bank
7 hours ago
OSLO (AFP) - Norway will put Nobel literature
laureate Knut Hamsun, who became an outcast and
was charged with treason after World War II for
his Nazi sympathies, on a commemorative coin,
the central bank said Friday.
"It is the author we are celebrating," Leif
Veggum, a central bank director, told AFP.
The coin, to be launched on February 19 on the
150th anniversary of Hamsun's birth, will be the
first commemorative coin dedicated to the author
of such masterpieces as "Hunger" (1890),
"Victoria" (1898) and "Growth of the Soil" (1917).
It will carry a nominal value of 200 kroner
(22.60 euros, 28.90 dollars), but will initially
be sold for 450 kroner, the bank said.
Long hailed as a national hero, Hamsun's final
years until his death in 1952 were spent in
social isolation in a country deeply embarrassed
and enraged by his decision in 1940 at the age of
80 to support the pro-Nazi regime of Norwegian
collaborator Vidkun Quisling.
When the Scandinavian country was liberated from
the German occupation in 1945, Norwegian
authorities charged Hamsun with treason. But
psychiatrists declared him to have weakened mental
capacities, and the charges were dropped.
Despite the fact that Hamsun is one of only three
Norwegians to have received the Nobel Literature
Prize, neither Oslo nor his hometown of Grimstad
have ever named a street or square after the author
and only a handful of towns in the Scandinavian
country have done so.
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