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 out of 6 stars

Oslo, late summer 2011
A month has passed since the terror attack July 22nd. Rebekka didn’t know anyone who died in the terror attack, and she believes that she is a kind of person who can keep on living. When her friend Fariba 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 terror attack all the time.

A graphic novel about being young in the time after a terror attack. A story about looking for meaning in life facing the meaningless, about being on the outside, sorrow and anxiety. About how demanding it can be to reach out for each other, and how crucial it is when we manage.