Aksel Sandemose

Aksel Sandemose (né Axel Nielsen; 19 March 1899, Nykøbing Mors, Denmark – 6 August 1965, Copenhagen) was a Danish-Norwegian writer.

He was born in Denmark in 1899 to a Danish father and a Norwegian mother. He is the grandfather of illustrator and children's writer Iben Sandemose. He attended a local school in Nykøbing on the island of Mors in his youth, and boarded a schooner for Norway at the age of seventeen.He worked as a teacher, journalist, sailor and lumberjack in Newfoundland. In 1930, Sandemose moved to Norway, and lived in Nesodden, south of Oslo. After Nazi Germany occupied Norway during World War II, he fled to neighboring Sweden in 1941 due to his peripheral association with the Norwegian resistance. After the war, he moved back to Norway, and settled in Søndeled. Sandemose fathered five children over his lifetime; three with his wife and then a set of twins with another woman. He died in Copenhagen in 1965, and was buried in Oslo.

Sandemose was one of six finalists for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1963.

In his 1933 novel En flykting krysser sitt spor (A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks), Sandemose introduced the concept of the Law of Jante. The rules of Jante Law are still discussed in recent times.

A Norwegian Air Shuttle Boeing 737, registration LN-DYP was named in memory of Sandemose, with a picture of him on the tail.