In his presentation speech for the 1928 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy’s Nobel Committee chair Per Hallström described the laureate in question as a “poetic genius whose roots must be in a great and well-ordered spirit”.
Sigrid Undset (1882-1949), the Norwegian novelist who won that Nobel “principally for her powerful descriptions of Northern life during the Middle Ages”, will soon be given the title Servant of God – the first step on the official journey to being raised to the altar as a saint. During a July pilgrimage in honour of St Sunniva to the abbey ruins on the Norwegian island of Selja, the bishop of Oslo announced that he had started the process to formally open Undset’s canonisation cause. Bishop Fredrik Hansen described her as “far more than an author and Nobel Prize laureate”. This Catholic convert, mother of three and fighter of Nazism is, he argued, “a model of Christian faith, of a life lived in virtue, and of the pursuit of holiness”.
