b. 1952 Oslo, Norway

A former philosophy teacher whose best-known novel, Sophie's World, was a surprise international best-seller, Jostein Gaarder is one of the most popular of contemporary Scandinavian authors. With over 20 million copies of Sophie in print and with an entire industry having sprung up around that one book -- there's a movie, a musical, a boardgame, even a CD-ROM based on the book -- he is presumably also one of the wealthiest.

What's so deucedly odd about this is that Gaarder's books usually mix in a hefty dose of philosophical pedagogy along with the story. Sophie's World is subtitled A Novel about the History of Philosophy and the book often seems closer to being a primer on western philosophical thought than a novel -- so much so that it has become a popular textbook for undergraduate philosophy courses. This hardly seems consistent with "popular" fiction.

Also unusual is that Gaarder often writes his stories from the viewpoint of an adolescent: Sophie Amundsen is 14; Hans Thomas (protagonist of The Solitaire Mystery) is just 12. Several of Gaarder's books (e.g., The Frog Castle and Hello? Is Anybody There?) are written more or less explicitly for children.

Despite these oddities, or perhaps because of them, Gaarder's books have proven to be fabulously popular in his native Norway and in several countries around the world. Sophie, for example, has been translated into 45 different languages. His latest novel, Sirkusdirektørens datter, (The Ringmaster's Daughter) was published by Aschehoug in 2001. The first English (UK) edition is scheduled for publication by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in October 2002.