Hamish Hamilton scoops debut by Norwegian 'sensation' Lovrenski

Hamish Hamilton has scooped Back in the Day by Oliver Lovrenski, the 19-year-old debutant who the publisher said has "taken Norway by storm" this autumn.

Editorial director Hermione Thompson bought world English rights from Senka Hasanovic at the Salomonsson Agency. Back in the Day will be translated into English by Nichola Smalley and published as a Hamish Hamilton hardback in spring 2025.

Back in the Day was published in Norway by Aschehoug this September. Since its release, it has topped the national hardback bestseller chart and won the Norwegian Bookseller Prize, making Lovrenski the youngest winner in the prize’s 75-year history.

The novel was also shortlisted for the Brage Award, a prestigious literary prize in Norway. Rights have sold in 15 territories so far, including to Actes Sud in France, Hanser Berlin in Germany and Brombergs in Sweden, while the Norwegian edition is now in its sixth print run.

Back in the Day follows four boys growing up on the outskirts of contemporary Oslo. The publisher described the novel as "a work of rare empathy, intimacy and insight – capturing the formidable wits and guts of its young characters, their playfulness and expressiveness, the nuance of their moral codes, and the importance of their relationships to one another – in defiance of alarmist headlines about gang crime and delinquent youth".

Lovrenski said: "I’ve seen them die, I’ve seen them live, but I’ve never seen their story told. I’m forever grateful for the novel’s success, because it means the story of our generation will be told and remembered until long after my own recollections have withered away."

Thompson added: "Oliver is a remarkable young writer. His fiction has the taut, compressed energy of poetry, coming at the reader in vivid flashes, like dispatches sent out from the midst of the action – revealing a world that is harsh and relentless, but also vibrantly, insistently alive.

"His instinct for the rhythms of language – indeed of the many languages he blends and braids together – is matched by a devastating emotional and psychological clarity."