Torvik, Solveig 1939-

PERSONAL:

Born 1939, in Oslo, Norway.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Winthrop, WA.

CAREER:

Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Seattle, WA, reporter, editor, columnist for thirty years. United Press International, Salt Lake City, UT, former reporter; San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco, CA, former reporter; San Jose Mercury News, San Jose, CA, former editor.

WRITINGS:

Nikolai's Fortune (novel), University of Washington Press (Seattle, WA), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS:

Solveig Torvik served for more than thirty years as a reporter, editor, and columnist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, as well as working for a number of other news organizations. After retiring to Winthrop, Massachusetts, Torvik turned her attentions to writing fiction, and the result is her first novel, Nikolai's Fortune, a sweeping, multigenerational historical work based heavily on the history of her own native Norway, as well as the histories of Sweden, Finland, and the United States. The characters are based on Torvik's own family members, and she weaves the story around her family's secrets. Torvik makes use of the research skills she honed as a journalist to bring hundreds of years of Scandinavian history and daily life into vivid detail. A contributor to Kirkus Reviews called the book "a brooding, often beautiful tale of life in the Far North," and "cheerless but memorable."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Kirkus Reviews, January 15, 2006, review of Nikolai's Fortune, p. 60.

ONLINE

Scandinavian Scene, http://www.plu.edu/˜scancntr/scandinavian-scene/ (July 18, 2007), author biography.

University of Washington Press,http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/ (July 18, 2007), author biography.