Jostein Gaarder
b. 1952 Oslo, Norway
A former philosophy teacher whose best-known novel, Sophie's World, was a surprise international best-seller, Jostein Gaarder is one of the most popular of contemporary Scandinavian authors. With over 20 million copies of Sophie in print and with an entire industry having sprung up around that one book -- there's a movie, a musical, a boardgame, even a CD-ROM based on the book -- he is presumably also one of the wealthiest. What's so deucedly odd about this is that Gaarder's books usually mix in a hefty dose of philosophical pedagogy along with the story. Sophie's World is subtitled A Novel about the History of Philosophy and the book often seems closer to being a primer on western philosophical thought than a novel -- so much so that it has become a popular textbook for undergraduate philosophy courses. This hardly seems consistent with "popular" fiction...
http://members.aol.com/wpwinter/nordland/gaarder.htm
I couldn't read it all, made me feel sick...but Norway gives the Nobel Peace Prize to terrorists, so it's no surprise.
