Per Petterson

Petterson's father, mother, brother and nephew died when a ferry caught fire on the overnight sailing from Oslo to Frederikshavn in northern Denmark (159 people lost their lives)....Sitting in the electricity-free extension to his white wooden house 60 miles south-east of Oslo, Petterson smiles at his last remark.The farmstead where Petterson and his wife Pia live with their sheep and chickens is reached by driving through a whitened landscape, across the Glomma river which, he tells visitors, separates the urban sphere from the "back bush". Asked the name of the area, he replies: "I say I live in the woods, near the Swedish border." The couple moved from the city a dozen years ago, with Pia's children from an earlier union. (It is also Petterson's second marriage.) "When we first came, it was so cold the duvet stuck to the wall." Now there is heating piped into each room and a cat or dog under every chair.