author
Martha Ostenso
1900–1963
Best known for the prairie classic Wild Geese, this Norwegian-born writer built a vivid literary world out of hardship, family conflict, and life on the Canadian plains. Her breakthrough novel became a bestseller and helped secure her place in both Canadian and American literary history.
1 Audiobook
Villihanhet
by Martha Ostenso
About the author
Born in Norway in 1900, she moved with her family to the United States as a small child and later lived in Manitoba, where many of the landscapes and tensions that shaped her fiction took root. Sources consistently describe her as a novelist with an important place in Canadian literary history, even though her life and career also stretched across the United States.
Her best-known book, Wild Geese (1925), brought her wide recognition. It won major novel prizes, became a bestseller, and is still the work most closely associated with her name. Critics and reference works note the novel's powerful prairie setting and its intense portrayal of family struggle, themes that continued through much of her writing.
She also worked as a screenwriter, and her fiction remained popular for many years after her debut. Remembered today as a Norwegian American author with deep ties to Manitoba, she stands out for bringing the emotional force of prairie life to a wide readership.