Hunger

Hunger as graphic novel: A masterpiece

“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. The novel tells the story of a Norwegian artist who wanders the streets of Christiania (now Oslo), struggling on the brink of starvation while trying to sell his articles to the local newspaper. As hunger overtakes his body and mind, the writer slides inexorably into paranoia and despair. The descent into madness is recounted by the unnamed narrator in increasingly urgent and disjointed prose as he loses his grip on his body and on reality itself.

Arising from Hamsun’s belief that literature ought to be about the mysterious workings of the human mind – an attempt, as he wrote, to describe «the whisper of blood and the pleading of bone marrow» – Hunger is a landmark work that pointed the way towards a new kind of novel. “Transforming literature into graphic novels is much more demanding than it sounds”, according to Sørheim. “The drawings easily become insignificant appendages, or they obfuscate the literary nerve in the writing. Ernstsen’s ability to reveal new perspectives in a novel as well-known as Hunger without impairing the prose, is no small achievement.”

Winner of the Brage Prize 2019
Grafill Gold Medal Best Book Adaptation + Best Comic Book 2020