TARJEI VESAAS (1897–1970) was a Norwegian poet and novelist whose sparse, poetic and figurative style won him international acclaim and three separate nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was born in his ancestral farmhouse in Vinje, southern Norway, which had been passed down from father to son for 300 years. With little taste for travel, he died there in 1970. In spite of his apparent isolation he was a prolific writer, publishing twenty-five novels as well as several volumes of poetry, short stories and plays. A literary modernist he wrote in his native Nyorsk rather than the Danish influenced Bokmål, and his mastery of the language contributed to its acceptance as a medium of world class literature. His writing is marked by its complex and humanist themes, his descriptions of the Nordic landscape and an attentive and mesmerizing prose style. Best known and best loved of his works are The Ice Palace, for which he won The Nordic Council's Literature Prize, The Birds and The Bridges. Vesaas is an enduring literary figure in his native Norway where his home has become a site of pilgrimage.