Hanna Astrup Larsen

Hanna Astrup Larsen (Decorah, Iowa, 1873 – Elmsford, New York, 1945) was a Norwegian-American writer, literary editor, and translator.

Larsen is best known from her editing roles with the American-Scandinavian Review (where she was literary editor from 1913 until 1921, when she was appointed editor). In 1921, Larsen was also appointed as the literary secretary of The American Scandinavian Foundation; in this role, she edited over 70 books published by that foundation.

Biography

Larsen was born in Decorah, Iowa, on September 1, 1873, died in Elmsford, New York, on December 3, 1945, and is buried in Lutheran Cemetery in Decorah, Iowa.

Hanna Astrup Larsen's father, Peter Laurentius Larsen, was a notable Norwegian Lutheran educator who became the founding president of Luther College.

Career

Hanna Astrup Larsen's early career began with editing roles at a number of Scandinavian-American newspapers, including the Norwegian language Amerika (Madison, Wisconsin) and the Swedish/English language Pacific Posten (San Francisco, California). Larsen then became special contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle and The San Francisco Call.

From 1908 to 1912, Larsen was a contributing writer for newspapers and magazines in New York (including Gustav Stickley's The Craftsman, where she published articles featuring Swedish painter Anna Boberg and the Elverhoj art colony in upstate New York). Larsen would later write articles for The New York Times.

Larsen was the author of Knut Hamsun (Alfred A. Knopf, 1922), a biography of the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun; she also wrote Selma Lagerlöf (Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1936), a biography of the Swedish author; in 1909, Lagerlöf was the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.