Missed Calls
AWARDED 2022 NORDIC COUNCIL CHILDREN AND YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE PRIZE
Awarded the 2021 Ministry of Culture Graphic Novel Prize
Awarded the 2021 Riksmål Prize for Excellent Prose
Awarded “GOLD Best Illustrations Children’s Books 2022”
The Year’s Most Beautiful Books (the Norwegian Designer’s Guild’s Visual Prize)
“This year’s prize winner has created a book which engages, touches and makes the reader reflect on collective, political societal issues alongside individual, existential questions.
The book’s visual language is sober and consistent, and carries a clear personal touch. Through pictures and text, the main character’s inner and outer life is depicted in an expressive and unsentimental way. The illustrations are fluid with an everyday melancholy, while the written language is both believable and spoken. Where the text withholds information, the pictures take over as the main narrator of the story. The use of colours is deliberate, effective and telling, and shows how the book’s creator is able to elegantly outline the boundary between past and present, between dreams and reality.”
From the Nordic Council jury’s statement
“(…) full of hope (…) few, or none, describe the depression of a nation and the tense atmosphere fall 2011 the way Nora Dåsnes does (…) A fine deed (…) Nora Dåsnes draws Oslo most likely the way Edvard Munch would have done today.”
Kristine Isaksen, VG, 6/ 6
“Missed Calls is a small story that makes a major impression.”
Erik Barkman, Weekendavisen
A month has passed since the terrorist attack July 22nd. Rebekka didn’t know anyone who died and she believes that she is a kind of person who can keep on living. When her best friend become a member of a political party, Rebekka gets occupied with the school’s revue, in Daniel with the curly hair, in partying, with school work, and with friends.
The problem is that Rebekka is thinking of the terrorist attack all the time.
A graphic novel about being young in the time following a terrorist attack. A story about searching for meaning in life when you are facing the meaningless. It’s a story about being on the outside, about sorrow and anxiety, and it’s a story about how demanding it can be to reach out for each other, and how crucial it is when we manage.
