Gunnhild Øyehaug

Gunnhild Øyehaug (b. 1975) lives in Bergen. She teaches at the Academy of Creative Writing in Hordaland and has been an editor of the literary journals Kraftsentrum and Vagant, and a literary critic in Morgenbladet and Klassekampen.

She made her debut with the poetry Collection Slave of the Blueberry in 1998. After a short story collection (Knots, 2004) and an essay collection (Chair and Ecstasy, 2006), she had her great breakthrough with her first novel, Wait, Blink in 2008. The novel was published to great acclaim in Denmark (Gyldendal), Sweden (Forum), Germany  (Suhrkamp) and USA (FSG).

When the short story collection Knots came out in USA (FSG) in 2017, James Wood called her "a Norwegian master of the short story" in the New Yorker. She has continued to write in different genres, and has published a short story collection, a collection of essays and two novels since 2008. Her latest novel is the sci fi-novel Present Tense Machine, where she explores the idea of parallell universes, in an original take on the genre.

Øyehaug also writes for film; she co-wrote the screen play based on own novel Wait, Blink, for the movie Women in Oversized Men's Shirts (2015) and has written the short film "Apple", which was awarded the prize for best script for a short film in 2018 by the Norwegian Writer's Guild. 

Øyehaug has also won several prizes for her writing, among them the Hunger Prize (2009) and the Dobloug Prize (2009).

Her short story “Apples” is selected The Best Short Stories of The Year 2022: The O. Henry Prize Winners

«Øyehaug is probably the best author in Norway under the age of 42, an intelligent, experimental and extremely self-reflexive humorist.» Morgenbladet

«Few Norwegian writers can depict life's gravity with more liberating lightness than Gunnhild Øyehaug.» VG