Sophie's World, a novel teaching teenagers philosophy, sold over 40 million copies
A former Bergen high school teacher wrote a novel in which a Norwegian girl receives mysterious lessons in the history of philosophy. Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World, published in 1991, has since been translated into 60 languages and has more than 40 million copies in print.
Gaarder was born in Oslo on 8 August 1952 into a family of educators: his father was a headmaster and his mother, Inger Margrethe Gaarder, a teacher who also wrote children's books. He attended Oslo Cathedral School, then read Scandinavian languages and theology at the University of Oslo, graduating in 1976. He married Siri Dannevig in 1974, and in 1979 the couple moved to Bergen, where they raised two sons and he taught high school before turning to writing.
His fiction tends to see the world through children's eyes and their capacity for wonder, and it delights in metafiction, nesting stories inside stories. Before the breakthrough, The Solitaire Mystery won the 1990 Norwegian Critics Prize for the year's best book for young readers. Sophie's World then collected the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis in 1994 and, in Italian translation, the Premio Bancarella in 1995, while Through a Glass, Darkly took the Norwegian Booksellers' Prize in 1993.
Later books kept smuggling big ideas into story form. Vita Brevis, from 1998, takes the shape of a letter to St Augustine, and The World According to Anna, from 2013, is a fable about the planet's climate and environment. Norway made him a Commander of the Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav in 2005, the same year Trinity College Dublin awarded him an honorary degree.
Environmental causes became a second career. In 1997 he and his wife founded the Sophie Prize, named after the novel, an annual award worth 100,000 US dollars for people and foundations working on sustainable development. Through it Gaarder gave away more than 1.5 million dollars. Money eventually ran short, and the final prize went to Bill McKibben in October 2013.
Source: Jostein Gaarder
