Knut Ødegård (1945) was born in Molde, Norway. As a writer, critic, translator, and public intellectual, he was responsible for founding the Reykjavik International Literary Festival in 1985. He also launched, in 1992, the Bjørnson Festival, a Norwegian literature festival held in homage to Nobel Laureate Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, and acted as its president for a decade. He is now the president of Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson-Akademiet, The Norwegian Academy of Literature and Freedom of Expression. A highly respected figure of contemporary Norwegian literature, Ødegård has published a large number of collections and has been translated into twenty languages. – His first volume of poems translated into Hungarian appeared in 1986, to be followed by a representative selection, in 2013, of poems translated by Gábor Szappanos. Ødegård himself is an accomplished translator, who rendered the poems of the Hungarian Gyula Illyés into Norwegian.