Ingvar Ambjørnsen

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Ingvar Ambjørnsen (2007)

Ingvar Ambjørnsen (born May 20, 1956 in Tønsberg , Norway ) is a writer and children's book author living in Germany .

Life

Ingvar Ambjørnsen spent his childhood in Larvik in southern Norway. During the late seventies and early eighties of the 20th century it was part of the hippie - outs - and squatters - subculture in Norway, worked as a typesetter and took a job as a gardener, among other things, factory workers as well as a nurse in a psychiatric hospital. Ambjørnsen lived in Bergen for a large part of this time . On more or less extensive trips to different European countries and metropolises, he acquired a strongly multicultural and youth-cultural perspective, which comes to the fore again and again in his later works.

From the early eighties onwards, he processed his experiences in the marginal areas of society, according to Ambjørnsen his “informal training as a writer”, in more or less autobiographical novels and short stories. In 1985 he settled permanently in Hamburg . The first German-language Ambjørnsen title was published in 1986 by Buntbuch Verlag, the novel Sarons Haut. In the following years, the left-wing publisher Edition Nautilus, also based in Hamburg, published other Ambjørnsen novels .

Since the beginning of 1990, Ambjørnsen has succeeded step by step in winning over a wider audience in Germany as well. One step was the children's book series Peter und der Prof, initially published by Verlag Sauerländer , which had a total of almost a dozen titles. However, his Elling novels in particular caused a sensation from the end of the nineties. It was partially filmed under the name Elling in 2002 and, with around 500,000 moviegoers to date, is one of the most successful Norwegian novel adaptations since the turn of the millennium in 2000.

The first performance in 1999 at the Oslo Nye Teater Centralteateret also saw a remarkable success for the play Elling by Axel Hellstenius . After the German-language premiere in 2003 at Schmidts Tivoli in Hamburg, it was played in over 50 theaters across Germany; Performances in Austria and Switzerland followed.

In addition to his novels, Ambjørnsen also works as an author or co-author of plays and non-fiction books. Awarded several literary prizes in his home country Norway, he is still little known to the general public in Germany despite some thirty genre-overlapping publications. Ingvar Ambjørnsen is married to the translator Gabriele Haefs , who has also translated most of his novels and stories into German.

Style and work

Unlike Norway, where his described from a highly autobiographical perspective impressions of the Freak - subculture of the seventies found early appeal, which translated into German novels of Ingvar Ambjørnsen were initially more a case of a small, close insider audience. The pulp story Sarons Haut , published in 1986, depicts the odyssey of a young dropout in search of love and the meaning of life in hard-mounted, sometimes surrealistic text sequences . White niggers , viewed by many as an autobiography in disguise, is a developmental novel about the drug and dropout scene of the seventies and eighties, written from the perspective of the insider . The same applies to the Ambjørnsen debut, The Last Deal, which is based in the small dealership environment of Bergen . The three novels Stalin's Eyes, San Sebastian Blues and The Mechanical Woman are set in socially marginalized areas such as the drug and petty criminal scene as well as the red light district .

In his stories, Ambjørnsen combines realistic, sometimes relentless and harsh descriptions of the milieu with a sympathy that clearly differs from post-modern , pop-cultural or zeitgeist-oriented literary trends. In his series of books for young people, Peter und der Prof , published in the late eighties, the author combines the support for general values ​​such as justice and solidarity with the weak with political problems such as nuclear power, human trafficking, racism and neo-Nazis. With the character of Elling, a former psychiatric inmate who lives with his mother, Ambjørnsen has created an antihero whose experiences - as the success of the film of the same name shows - not only provide identification points for the disadvantaged in society, but also for a wider audience.

Ambjørnsen is difficult to locate as a contemporary author due to his stylistically straightforward, straightforward writing style and the choice of his subjects. The author and his meanwhile more than thirty titles of novels, short stories and non-fiction books are still only occasionally noticed from the high literature. Franz Dobler , Jakob Arjouni , Wiglaf Droste and the young adult author Klaus-Peter Wolf can be named as authors with a comparable spelling and partly similar topics .

Publications

Novels from the eighties and early nineties

The number of pages in Sarons Haut refers to the first edition by the Hamburg Buntbuch-Verlag from 1986. White Nigger was first published by Edition Nautilus in Hamburg. Two other titles that were first published there have also been published in paperback by Goldmann Verlag ( Stalins Augen ) and Scherz Verlag ( Die mechanical woman ).

Youth book series "Peter and the Prof"

Duplicate publication dates: the first year marks the first German publication by Verlag Sauerländer. Some of the titles in this series were also published in paperback by Unionsverlag .

Elling series

The order of the title is based on the order of the first publications.

Short stories

The listed volumes of short stories and short stories partly date from the early 1990s.

Non-fiction

  • Norway. A political travel book. VSA, Hamburg 1988, ISBN 3-87975-442-X .
  • with Karen Babey, Gabriele Haefs, Hans A. Wirth: Hamburg between Sekt and Selters 92. The critical guide through pubs, cafes, bars and bistros. Ars Vivendi, Cadolzburg 1992, ISBN 3-927482-22-6 .

Children's book series "Samson and Roberto"

  • And that's supposed to be music? Novel, 102 pages. Carlsen Verlag, Hamburg 2000. ISBN 3-551-55206-1 .
  • But we don't have to be afraid, do we? Novel, 103 pages. Carlsen Verlag, Hamburg 2000. ISBN 3-551-55176-6 .
  • How do we find THAT? Novel, 112 pages. Carlsen Verlag, Hamburg 2001. ISBN 3-551-55207-X .
  • Luck and spook and oh dear! Novel, 106 pages, dtv. junior, Munich 2018. ISBN 978-3-423-64036-7 .

Other titles

  • with Gabriele Haefs: The Queen is sleeping. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-596-16202-5 .
  • with Gabriele Haefs: The doll on the ceiling. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 3-596-16298-X .
  • Innocentia Park. Novel. Scherz, Frankfurt am Main 2006. ISBN 3-502-10055-1 .
  • with Norbert Fischer : The little heart that lies here has lost its life. Historic cemeteries in Germany. Am Galgenberg, Hamburg 1992, ISBN 3-87058-112-3 .
  • Axel Hellstenius: Elling. Play based on the novel "Blood Brothers". Translated from Norwegian by Gabriele Haefs. Theater publisher Whale Songs, Hamburg.
  • Christine Bette Bopp, Stephanie Kunz and Helmut Zhuber: View of paradise . Elling monologue based on the novel of the same name. Theater publisher Whale Songs, Hamburg.
  • Axel Hellstenius: Samson and Roberto. Children's play based on the book “Samson and Roberto: But we don't have to be afraid, do we?”. Translated from Norwegian by Gabriele Haefs. Theater publisher Whale Songs, Hamburg.
  • Up the Oridongo . Novel. Translated from the Norwegian by Gabriele Haefs. Edition Nautilus, Hamburg 2012. ISBN 978-3-89401-750-7 .
  • The night dreams of the day. Novel. German by Gabriele Haefs. Edition Nautilus, Hamburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-89401-788-0 .

CDs

  • with Jens Wawrczeck, Heinz W. Kraehkamp, ​​Jule Böwe: Elling writes. The Audio Verlag, Freiburg 2003, ISBN 3-89813-260-9 .

The "Samson and Roberto" audio CDs are also available as audio cassettes:

  • with Rainer Gussek, Corny Littmann , Peter Kampfe, Ilja Richter : Samson and Roberto: But we don't have to be afraid, do we? Treehouse Media, 2002, ISBN 3-8315-2061-5 .
  • with Rainer Gussek, Corny Littmann, Peter Kampfe, Ilja Richter: Samson and Roberto: Pater Pietro's secret. Treehouse Media, 2004, ISBN 3-8315-2153-0 .

Awards

  • several Norwegian literary prizes, including the 1996 Bokhandlerprisen for Brødre i blodet ("Blood Brothers")
  • 1986 Literature grant from the City of Hamburg
  • 1988 Literature scholarship from the city of Lübeck with city clerk's apartment in the Buddenbrookhaus
  • 1988 Cappelen Prize

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Presentation of the book edition of the play ( Memento of the original from October 3, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at Hartmann & Stauffacher Verlag, Cologne.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.hsverlag.com
  2. ↑ A thick, cold mist settles over hill and dale. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , October 8, 2012.
personal data
SURNAME Ambjørnsen, Ingvar
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Norwegian writer
DATE OF BIRTH May 20, 1956
PLACE OF BIRTH Tonsberg , Norway