Lars Saabye Christensen was born in Oslo in 1953. Since his début in 1976 he has written ten collections of poetry, five collections of short stories and twelve novels. His great break through came with the novel Beatles (Beatles) in 1984. The bookstore sale of over 200,000 copies of the Norwegian edition has made this one of the greatest commercial successes in Norway, and it was voted the best novel of the last twenty-five years by Dagbladet's readers in 2006. It has been translated into numerous European languages, as have several of Christensen's subsequent novels and short story collections. His Half Brother, in Kenneth C. Steven's translation, was a finalist for the 2004 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. In 2003 he published the novel Maskeblomstfamilien (The Foxgloves). His fifth short story collection, Oscar Wildes heis (Oscar Wilde's Elevator), was issued in 2004, and in 2005 he published Modellen (The Model).