Girl, 1983: A heart-rending and beautiful literary novel one of Norway's most prominent, award-winning writers
About this ebook
A heart-rending work of autofiction from one of Norway's most prominent literary writers
Paris, a winter’s night in 1983. She is sixteen years old, lost in unfamiliar streets. On a scrap of paper in her pocket is the address of a photographer, K, thirty years her senior. Almost four decades later, as her life and the world around her begins to unravel, the grown woman seeks to comprehend the young girl of before and looks for ways to disclose a long-guarded secret.
Set in Oslo, New York and Paris, Girl, 1983 is a genre-defying and bravura quest through layers of memory and oblivion – a raw and haunting exposure of beauty and forgetting, desire and shame, power and powerlessness.
‘Ullmann’s gaze on the power and pain of a teenage girl as remembered and restaged by her adult self is unflinching and startling’ Deborah Levy
LONGLISTED FOR THE WARWICK PRIZE FOR WOMEN IN TRANSLATION 2026
About the author
Linn Ullmann (Author)
Linn Ullmann is one of the most prominent voices in contemporary Scandinavian literature. Her novels have been translated into over twenty languages, and she has received numerous awards, including the Amalie Skram Prize, the Dobloug Prize and the Aschehoug Prize – all for her collected body of work. Girl, 1983 was nominated for the prestigious Nordic Council Literature Prize, as was its predecessor Unquiet, published by Hamish Hamilton in 2020. The two novels form part of an ongoing trilogy, meditating on memory, rage and desire.
Martin Aitken (Translator)
Martin Aitken’s translations of Scandinavian fiction are widely published. His work has appeared on the shortlists of the International Booker Prize, the Dublin Literary Award and the US National Book Awards, among other prizes. He received the PEN America Translation Prize in 2019 and, for the first book in the Morning Star cycle, the US National Translation Award in Prose in 2022. He lives in Denmark
