Book, Novel
Åsne Seierstad
Since Winning the EMMA Award
Åsne Seierstad is a Norwegian freelance Journalist and writer who followed the atrocities in Oslo and Utoya in July 2011.
Åsne attended Anders Breivik’s trial and went on to publish the 2013 book One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway—and Its Aftermath, which highlights Anders Breivik’s attacks on 22 July 2011. The book became a European bestseller and made the New York Times bestseller list.
In 2024, she published The Afghans, which examines Afghanistan’s past, present, and future through the lives of three people. Åsne Seierstad has received many national and international awards for her work as a journalist and author.
Background (Before 2004)
Åsne Seierstad is a Norwegian freelance journalist and writer who is best known for her accounts of everyday life in war zones, including Kabul after 2001 and Baghdad in 2002.
Born in Oslo to a feminist author mother and an active politician father, Åsne majored in Russian, Spanish and History of Ideas at the University of Oslo. From 1993 to 1996, Åsne reported for the Arbeiderbladet in Russia and from China in 1997. From 1998 to 2000, she worked for the national public broadcaster NRK, reporting from the Serbian breakaway province of Kosovo.
Åsne’s first book, 2000s With Their Backs to the World: Portraits of Serbia, is an account of this time. As a reporter, she is known for her work in war zones such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Chechnya, as well as for her reports on the September 9/11 attacks in the United States.
Åsne’s next book, The Bookseller of Kabul (EMMA Award winner), details the time she spent living with an Afghan family in Kabul after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. Her other books include 2005’s One Hundred and One Days: A Baghdad Journal, which describes the three months she spent in Iraq in the build-up to the United States-led invasion in 2003, and 2007’s Angel of Grozny: Inside Chechnya, which is an account of the time she spent in Chechnya after the war.
