Steinar Opstad was born in 1971 in southern Norway, in Stokke and now lives in Oslo. He studied German, History of Religion and World Literature at the University of Oslo and the University of Bergen. His first volume of poems, Tablets and Commandments, came out in 1996 and has been followed by seven more volumes of poetry, the latest being Kjærlighetstapene (The Losses of Love, 2015). He has also published a book of essays about Nordic modernist poetry and edited various anthologies. Steinar Opstad has won several prestigious literary prizes, from his debut until present, among them the Tarjei Vesaas Literary Award for the best first book in 1997, the Aschehoug Prize in 2003 and the Swedish Academy Dobloug Prize in 2017.