Hanus Kamban

Hanus Kamban (born 25 June 1942 in Saltangará, Faroe Islands) is a Faroese short story writer, essayist, biographer and poet. He was born Hanus Andreassen, but changed his last name to Kamban in 2000.[1][2]

Hanus Kamban at the Nordic Council Literature Prize 2012

Kamban grew up on the small island of Skúvoy and moved to Tórshavn in 1956.[3]

He writes about the quite sudden modernisation of the Faroese society post World War II. He published his first short story anthology in 1980, and has translated William Shakespeare, Kafka, Graham Greene and other great writers and poets from other countries to Faroese. From 1994 to 1997 he published a three-volume biography of one of the most important Faroese poets, Janus Djurhuus. It was translated into Danish and published in two volumes in 2001. He was nominated to the Nordic Council's Literature Prize for the first time in 2003 for his short story anthology Pílagrímar (Pilgrims). In 2012 he was nominated for the second time to the Nordic Council's Literature Prize, this time for his short story anthology Gullgentan, which was published in Faroese in 2010 and in Danish in 2012.[4] The title means "The Golden Girl".

Kamban won the Faroese Literature Prize, which in Faroese is called Mentanarvirðisløn M. A. Jacobsens, in 1980 and again in 1986. In 2004 he won the Faroese Cultural Prize. In February/March 2013 Kamban was invited to the Kennedy Center in Washington DC for the Nordic Cool Festival. He was one of the Nordic writers/poets on the Literature Panel with the theme In the Cracks Between the Lines – Magic Realism of the North.[5]

He was president of the Association of Writers of the Faroe Islands (Rithøvundafelag Føroya) 1992–94.