Ingeborg Kringeland Hald

Ingeborg Kringeland Hald was born in Norway in 1962. She wrote song lyrics for the Christina Björdal Band and managed the group. In 2010/2011, she was responsible for the idea and the script for the show »Maudelin Jazzteater presenterer kontrabassen« (tr. The Maudelin jazz theater presents the contrabass).

Her literary debut »Albin Prek« (2010) was nominated for the Brage Prize and the Debut Prize of the Norwegian Culture Ministry. This novel for children aged ten and older tells the story of eleven-year-old Albin, who flees with his mother and siblings from Bosnia to Norway, where the threat of deportation leads him to flee again. Albin hides in a car with which Amanda, Lisa, and their grandparents are headed for vacation. A review in the »Süddeutschen Zeitung« called Hald’s children’s book on flight and asylum current and important, because it sensitizes young readers by placing the fate of people their age at the center of the story. An individual fate gives a face to the mass misery that the media otherwise treat anonymously; the book’s open end spurs hope without simply giving the tragic starting situation a happy end and without becoming a tearjerker in its empathy with refugees. The author uses a constant shifting between two levels of narration, one for Albin’s experiences in Bosnia, the other for his experiences in Norway; this maintains the suspense and sharpens contrasts. For example, Albin is a bus passenger on both trips. While fleeing Bosnia with his family, the drive is characterized by heat and hunger; the bus in Norway is cold and almost empty. The book shows the horror of war through the eyes of a child who reports honestly, though he is not always able to understand what he experiences. In 2013, Hald published her second novel, »Gullkalven«, which depicts two completely different families. Magnus, from Oslo, has more or less everything he needs; when he is brazen enough to wish to fly to his graduation ball in a helicopter, his parents punish him by sending him to his uncle. The latter’s family lives like Vikings and does without all such civilizational achievements as cell phones and PCs. Even if Magnus and his cousin Loke, who dreams of money and technology, do not seem to become friends at first, the pampered boy experiences more adventures than ever before, especially during a big live-action role-playing game that reenacts a historical saga and in which realistic props create more suspense than desired. Hald capably ties the present day with the past, also linguistically.

Ingeborg Kringeland Hald lives in Haugesund, Norway.

Gullkalven

Mangschou

Bergen, 2013

Vielleicht dürfen wir bleiben

Carlsen

Hamburg, 2015