Hamsun, Knut, HAHM sun, knoot (1859-1952), was a Norwegian author who wrote with deep feeling about nature and the land. He won the 1920 Nobel Prize for literature for his novels. His best-known novel, The Growth of the Soil (1917), realistically describes the hard life of peasants in rural Norway. His early novels, Hunger (1890), Mysteries (1892), and Pan (1894), study those who have been rejected by society and who, in turn, reject society.