Winter from Beginning to End

Runе Belsvik’s tales about Prostodoursen and his friends are very popular in Norway. And at last they’ve arrived in audio format!

In a small riverside country, the heroes’ lives are full of ordinary worries: here they chop wood and dig ditches, bake bread and dry shoes, look up at the sky and toss pebbles into the water… But here’s the amazing thing: just change the angle of your gaze, and the simplest things fill with special meaning and warm the heart. Wise Kòrigrensen, Octava with her songs, and the Duckling with its tricks know how to rejoice and make others rejoice so much that even the cunning Pronyrsen and the not-so-nice Sdobsen catch the mood. The book includes three of the six stories about Prostodoursen.

More to come: soon the second part of the stories set in the Riverside Country—“Prostodoursen. Summer and Something Else”—will be released as an audiobook. Both books are read by the wonderful actress and theatre and film director Yekaterina Gorokhovskaya.

About the author

Rune Belsvik was born in 1956 near the Norwegian city of Kristiansand. It’s the southern tip of Norway—a warm seaside city from which multi-deck ferries run to Denmark. While studying at a prestigious gymnasium, Belsvik noticed that it felt as if he was constantly taking part in a race of “who’s the coolest?” and it made him tired. The race has no end: you keep running up an escalator that’s moving down; you stop for a breath, and you’re immediately carried back down—and you’re always comparing yourself to everyone else and often thinking you’re worse than someone. But once you take a pen and paper and start writing, instead of that imposed life, another one appears. This magic was so appealing to Belsvik that he started writing for real—he published his first book in 1979 and has been writing for the last thirty-five years, combining authorship only with work at a center supporting people with disabilities who, because of that, cannot live on their own and need kind involvement.

The Prostodoursen books entered Norway’s “Golden Children’s Library,” alongside books about the Moomins, “Alice in Wonderland,” “The Chronicles of Narnia,” “Winnie-the-Pooh,” and other children’s classics.

In 2014, the Guild of Literary Translators awarded Olga Drobot the “Master” prize for her translation of a book.