Sigrid Undset

Sigrid Undset was born in 1882 in Kalundborg, Denmark, the daughter of a Norwegian archaeologist and a Danish mother, and grew up in Christiania, now Oslo. Her father's study of the past gave her a lifelong love of the Middle Ages. After his early death she left school and worked for ten years as a secretary in an office to help support her family, writing in her spare time. Her first novels, including Jenny (1911), portrayed modern women in Oslo. She married the painter Anders Castus Svarstad and had three children. Her trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter (1920-1922), set in fourteenth-century Norway, made her famous, and in 1924 she was received into the Catholic Church, a choice that shaped her later work, including The Master of Hestviken. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928. A strong opponent of Nazism, she fled Norway after the German invasion of 1940 and spent the war years in the United States; her son Anders was killed fighting the invaders. She returned in 1945 and died at Lillehammer in 1949.

Sigrid Undset is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Raised Lutheran by atheist parents; converted to Roman Catholicism in 1924 and became a lay Dominican four years later, and her faith shaped her later novels and essays on saints. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica