Nikolai Torgersen - Selected Title Author
We are happy to present our selected title author Nikolai Torgersen. He has written Streets I Have Lived (original title: Gater jeg har levd). The book is one of NORLA’s Selected Titles of the autumn 2025.
What is your book about?
Poverty, addiction, illness, shame, homelessness, and turbulent childhoods are recurring threads running throughout my work, and these are often pointed out as the themes of the book. But for me, it is first and foremost a story about life’s unwavering brutality and incomprehensible complexity. The narrative is driven by my own life story, with all its highs and lows. It is autofiction, and the material leans heavily on what I myself have lived through – from childhood traumas with social services, break-ins, and death, to being admitted to addiction clinics in adulthood and my breakthrough as an artist. At the heart of my work is a desire to see past my own impulses and self-deceptions, in an attempt to find more nuanced answers than those disguised as truths in instincts and feelings.
What inspired you to write this book?
Like everything else I create, I think my projects grow out of a need to understand something, and quite often, that “something” is myself and my messy experience of life. I guess there’s a restlessness tied to my work, no matter what I’m making, an underlying need to correct what feels wrong, or to gain perspective on what feels elusive and unfathomable. If I never take those mental journeys back in time to understand the present, I feel like I’m missing out on a great deal. It does me good to reshuffle what seems fixed in place, and to concretize what feels distant and unclear.
Read more
See full presentation of the book here
Read more about the author here
See all NORLA’s Selected Titles for the autumn 2025 here
