Carl Joachim Hambro

Carl Joachim Hambro (7 June 1914 – 19 February 1985) was a Norwegian novelist, journalist, essayist, translator and Romance philologist. The son of the Conservative politician C. J. Hambro, he embarked on a philological career, graduating in 1939. During the Second World War he lectured at Oslo Commerce School and the Norwegian College in Uppsala. After the war, he taught Norwegian at Sorbonne, and also started working as Paris correspondent for the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation and a few Norwegian daily newspapers. Born into a well-read and educated family, Hambro developed a penchant for French literature, marking a distinction from the literary taste of his parents—they had been readers of English literature in the Anglo-American tradition. Making his debut in 1960 with the satirical novel De frafalnes klubb, Hambro published trilogies and other novels for the next two decades. He had a keen interest in linguistics; in the 1969 book Ting, tanke, tale he problematized linguistic questions in a popular scientific way. A translator of French literature, he chaired the Norwegian Association of Literary Translators in the early 1960s. Biography Early life and education