"Now the boat is gliding towards the island in the skerries, an island in the sea with green beaches.
Here, flowers live for no one’s eyes; they stand so distant and watch me land."

Knut Hamsun moved together with his family to Hamarøy and Hamsun around Midsummer’s Day in 1862 from Lom in Gudbrandsdalen. They travelled via Dovre by horse-drawn cart and on foot. They continued from Trondheim on the steam ship Ægir and in all likelihood to Grøtøy in Steigen, from where they travelled by boat to Hamarøy.

Knut Hamsun began school in the winter of 1868, a mobile school hosted by one of the neighbours. After a while, he began at school in Uteid, by which time he had moved in with his Uncle Hans at the vicarage.
He attended a total of 252 school days over a six-year period.

In the summer of 1874, he gained employment from one of Salten’s wealthiest men, Nicolai Anton Walsøe, a trader on Tranøy, who ran a large-scale business based on the prosperous herring fisheries. He worked as a shop assistant and in the space of that brief year on Tranøy he gained sufficient insight into the trading post. Legend has it that he fell in love with the trader’s daughter, Laura, and was ordered to leave the place. It remains unclear whether this is in fact true or if the herring deserted the area and Walsøe was forced to rationalise the company. However, the latter explanation is more plausible.

After an absence of 21 years, Knut Hamsun returned to Hamarøy at the onset of summer in 1900. He had already become a renowned and controversial author and had published three books, which remain highlights of European literature: Hunger (1890), Mysteries (1892) and Pan (1894). He lived together with his parents in their small cottage, but after a while moved into a turf hut at Hansbakk. He lived here for a few weeks while writing Munken Vendt. In early July, he travelled southwards

The visit to Hamarøy in the summer of 1900 must have generated an appetite for more. In the years ahead, Hamsun’s poetry took on a distinctly North Norwegian flavour, with novels Dreamers (1904), Benoni and Rosa (1908). Knut Hamsun returned to Hamarøy in the summer of 1911 with his new wife, Marie. They moved into a farm at Skogheim and remained there for six years. He had dreamed of being a farmer, but Marie took on the farming duties so Knut had peace to write, which he experienced best away from the farm and the children.
Hamsun’s years at Skogheim was strongly marked by the same that had characterised the preceding years of his life: restless roaming from place to place.

From a literary perspective, the six years were extremely prolific. He wrote three long novels during this time Children of Age (1913), Segelfoss Town volumes 1 and 2 (1915) and Growth of the Soil volumes 1 and 2 (1917) - the novel that won him the Nobel Prize for literature in 1920.

In 1917, the family left Hamarøy and established itself at Nørholm, near Grimstad, where he lived until his death in 1952.

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