Sjömansbiblioteket

What happens to your personality if you don't know who you really are?
'He was possessed by the idea of doing the most startling things in order to astonish his fellowmen. He loved to dazzle and amaze people.'

The Prisoner Who Sang portrays Andreas, an eccentric and village outcast. He is so lacking in his own identity that he takes on several different personalities and then accuses himself of murdering one of them.

Andreas opportunistically takes on many disguises in real life such as an aristocrat and a businessman, and unfortunately crosses the line which leads to some time in prison. This is a humorous but ultimately tragic story of a lonely imaginative man.

Johan Bojer (born Johan Kristoffer Hansen) was a popular Norwegian novelist and dramatist. He grew up as a foster child in a poor family living in Rissa near Trondheim, Norway. He learned early the realities of poverty.

Bojer principally wrote about the lives of the poor farmers and fishermen, both in his native Norway and among the Norwegian immigrants in the United States. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times. He is best remembered for his novel 'The Emigrants', a major novel dealing with the motivations and trials of Norwegians emigrated on the plains of North Dakota.