Hans Heiberg

Hans Heiberg (28 January 1904 – 6 December 1978) was a Norwegian journalist, literary critic, theatre critic, essayist, novelist, playwright, translator and theatre director.

Early and personal life Heiberg was born in Kristiania as son of city manager Jacob Vilhelm Rode Heiberg (1860–1946) and Christiane Jeanette Aimée Dedichen. He was married to Alette Elisabeth Wiland from 1929 to her death in 1941, and to nurse Sigrid Berner Høy from 1942. He was a nephew of playwright and theatre director Gunnar Heiberg, physician Inge Heiberg and psychiatrist Henrik Dedichen, and a second cousin of Supreme Court Justice Axel Heiberg, architect Bernt Heiberg and railway director Edvard Heiberg.

Career Heiberg finished his secondary education in 1922, and finished his law studies with the cand.jur. degree in 1927. He worked as a foreign correspondent for Dagbladet and Arbeiderbladet, in Great Britain and Ireland in 1929, in Finland in 1930, in Japan and China in 1932, and in Paris from 1938 to 1939.

After the war he was a literary critic and theatre critic for Verdens Gang from 1945 to 1952.

He translated more than two hundred novels and plays into Norwegian language. Among his literary works are the satirical novels Gutten i jacket (1931) and Ta den ring og la den vandre – (1934). He wrote the two plays Broen (1945) and Minnefesten (1946). A selection of his literary critics was issued in Peilinger (1950). He wrote a biography on Henrik Ibsen in 1967, and a biography on Henrik Wergeland in 1972. He received the Arts Council Norway Honorary Award in 1973,