Non-Fiction_GRAPHIC NOVELS

In this graphic novel, Trond Bredesen depicts his mother who suffered from dementia and had to move into a retirement home at the end of her life. He does this honestly and unsentimentally, with humour and love.

‘The idea for and work on this book started when my mother moved into the institution. I began to write down what she said and did when we visited her and talked on the phone. I took photos and films and hurriedly scribbled down sketches to remember the time, place and situation. Mum’s confused comments, an unappetizing toilet chair and a bedside table with medicines, chocolate, energy drinks and diapers became interesting motifs and script ideas. In two years, I had a pile of documents that slowly turned into this book.’ – Trond Bredesen

Through history feminists have been ridiculed and harassed all around the World. In the 18th Century well known feminists where decapitated in the guillotines, and in the 19th Century the Suffragettes were thrown in jail. In our time feminist activists are imprisoned in countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia. Feminists are labelled as moody, angry and unattractive. Still, new generations are daring to proudly call themselves feminists.
Author Marta Breen and illustrator Jenny Jordahl have through a number of books proved themselves as great communicators when it comes to the history of women. In this book they take the reader for a joyride through the cultural history of the patriarchy.

The world’s oldest cartoon is around 15 000 years old. Today, cartoons are an endangered art form, as we see a tendency for satirical drawings to be eliminated by the international press. The fear of severe retaliation has massively grown.
Why does it come so naturally to us to create satire, and why is it capable of provoking more than a thousand words? In this book, Erle Marie Sørheim presents the history of satirical drawings, from cave paintings to our own time, in search of their essence. This is the story of the world’s first cartoon, of why the Democratic party’s symbol is a donkey, and why the publication of the Muhammad cartoons can be a matter of life and death.

“A Norwegian fiction classic has become a brand-new comics classic. This story now shines in another language – the language of the graphic novel. This is a medium the artist has mastered, bending and stretching with great persuasion in his respect for the source book.” (Grafill Jury, Gold Medal 2020).
Knut Hamsun’s Hunger (1890) is arguably the most influential Norwegian novel in history – a true classic of modern literature, and a forerunner of the psychologically driven fiction of Kafka, Camus and Saramago.
Winner of the Brage Prize 2019
Grafill Gold Medal Best Book Adaptation + Best Comic Book 2020

Steffen Kverneland’s deeply personal graphic novel A Voluntary Death, contemplates his father and his father’s suicide, when Kverneland was eighteen, and how this affected his life. In addition to Kverneland’s outstanding art, the book uses family photographs in a dynamic way. The storytelling is immediate and powerful, at times with a liberating humor.

Winner of the 2018 Ministry of Culture’s Prize for best cartoon and the 2018 Book Blogger’s Prize for best non-fiction

George Grosz (1893–1959) was a German fine artist, cartoonist, and teacher who drew from pop culture, was active in the Dada and New Objectivist movements, and was an influence for artists like Ben Shahn. In this graphic biography, written and drawn by Fiske, angular art lays Kandinsky-like lines over scenes set in anything-goes, post–World War I Berlin: connecting, emphasizing, tracing movement. Curves evoke the fleshy sex of Grosz’s work.

Symbolically, Fiske uses two colors—red for Berlin, a slash of Grosz’s lipstick, a flash of tie—and green for the jazz and trains of New York, where Grosz would flee from Nazi Germany. Fiske’s thoughtful Grosz is a far cry from the plodding pedantry of the graphic hagiographies that earnestly clutter library shelves; it’s a work of art in its own right.

Rikard Jakobsen was born in 1875 on Madagascar, where his parents were missionaries. When he was six years old, the family moved back home to Stavanger. After Rikard’s mother died, his father remarried and returned to missionary service with his new wife. Rikard and his older sister and brother, Elisabeth and Jakob, were left in Stavanger, at Solbakken, a children’s home for missionary children. Rikard was eight when his father left, and ten years were to pass before they saw each other again.

The comic book creator Lene Ask tells Rikard’s story based on the exchange of letters between Rikard and his father, which she discovered in the Mission Archives in Stavanger.

In 1919 Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) started his own dadaist art movement Merz, in his hometown of Hannover, and became one of the great modernist pioneers. Schwitters interacted with the avantgarde artist of his time, and was himself active in a number of art forms, he shocked the establishment and irritated the dadaists. His radical indoor structure Merzbau, perhaps the first installation in the world, was way ahead of it’s time, along with the sound poem Ursonate.

Edvard Munch (1863-1944) is one of the world’s most important modern artists. Munch is a graphic biography, a unique project in the way it is told exclusively through quotes by Munch and his contemporaries.

Kverneland incorporates Munch’s art in the book, with samples and quotations expertly executed throughout the book. The overall effect is startling, and we get a loving and humorous close-up of the master expressionist, as well as a group portrait of the Scandinavian bohemia of the late nineteenth century.