The other nominees are Junot Díaz ( The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao), Andrew O’Hagan ( Be Near Me), Stewart O'Nan ( Last Night at the Lobster) and Marianne Wiggins ( The Shadow Catcher: A Novel).

The Los Angeles Times Book Prizes were established in 1980 and nine prizes are awarded annually. Among the last year’s winners in the Fiction category are distinguished authors like Gabriel García Márquez, Colm Tóibín, Ian McEwan and W.G. Sebald.

The award ceremony at UCLA kicks off the largest literary festival in the US, the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which last year counted 140 000 attendees.

The L.A. Times recently printed a three page interview with Petterson. Click here to read the entire interview.

Out Stealing Horses has received massive international attention since it was published in 2003, and Petterson has been awarded several prestigious prizes for the novel. In Great Britain he was, as the first Norwegian author ever, awarded the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. In France he was awarded the literary prizes Littéraire Européen Madeleine Zepter and Le Prix Mille Pages, and he was nominated to the respected literary prize Le Prix Médicis. Out Stealing Horses has also been elected one of the five best books of 2007 by several foreign newspapers, among them the New York Times Book Review. In Norway he received the Bookseller’s Prize and the Norwegian Critics’ Prize for the novel.

Click here for a presentation of the book.