Without planning to, I’ve read a surprising number of books by Norwegian novelists in the past year: Undset, Knausgard, Fosse. Has there been an eruption of Norwegian literature in recent times? I think of 20th-century Ireland, when a country long seen as an ignorant backwater produced a torrent of great literature (Joyce, Beckett, Yeats, etc.) in a short time. How does this happen? What sets it off?
I learned recently that there are a few distinct dialects of Norwegian, and that Jon Fosse is distinctive in writing in Nynorsk, not usually seen as a literary language if I understand correctly.