Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)
Henrik Ibsen is often referred to as the father of modern drama and is Norway’s most well-known playwright of all time. He had a fascination for Egypt and the Arab world, and parts of his main work, Peer Gynt, is set in Morocco, the Sahara Desert and Cairo. Henrik Ibsen visited Egypt himself in fact, to attend the opening of the Suez Channel in 1869, as Sweden and Norway’s official representative for the occasion. Henrik Ibsen criticized the bourgeois double standard in his plays and wasn’t afraid of speaking his mind. Because of this, he was considered quite scandalous by some, but his popularity kept rising, and his plays are now being staged across the world.
At the book fair, Nina Marie Evensen from the Center for Ibsen Studies, will be diving deeper into Ibsen’s work and his relation to the Arab world.