Aimée Sommerfelt was a Norwegian

Norway

Norway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...

 author of numerous children's books and young adult novels.

She was most famous for her 1959 work The Road to Agra. In 1961, it became her first book to be published in the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

, being translated

Translation

Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. Whereas interpreting undoubtedly antedates writing, translation began only after the appearance of written literature; there exist partial translations of the Sumerian Epic of...

 into English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 by Evelyn Ramsden. For The Road to Agra, Sommerfelt won the Jane Addams Children's Book Award and the Josette Frank Award

Josette Frank Award

The Josette Frank Award is an annual children's literary award for fiction that honors a book or books of "outstanding literary merit in which children or young people deal in a positive and realistic way with difficulties in their world and grow emotionally and morally".Known as the Children's...

.

Personal life

She was the daughter of a psychiatrist

Psychiatrist

A psychiatrist is a physician who specializes in the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders. All psychiatrists are trained in diagnostic evaluation and in psychotherapy...

, Henrik Arnold Thaulow (not to be confused with the writer Henrik Arnold Thaulow Wergeland).

She married linguist Alf Sommerfelt

Alf Sommerfelt

Alf Sommerfelt , was a Norwegian linguist and the first professor of linguistics in Norway, working at the University of Oslo from 1931 to 1962.-Linguistics work:...

.

She became blind

Blindness

Blindness is the condition of lacking visual perception due to physiological or neurological factors.Various scales have been developed to describe the extent of vision loss and define blindness...

 late in her life.

Themes in her work

Her books usually highlighted issues of social justice

Social justice

Social justice generally refers to the idea of creating a society or institution that is based on the principles of equality and solidarity, that understands and values human rights, and that recognizes the dignity of every human being. The term and modern concept of "social justice" was coined by...

. They placed child protagonist

Protagonist

A protagonist is the main character of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical narrative, around whom the events of the narrative's plot revolve and with whom the audience is intended to most identify...

s in extremely difficult circumstances, such as poverty

Poverty

Poverty is the lack of a certain amount of material possessions or money. Absolute poverty or destitution is inability to afford basic human needs, which commonly includes clean and fresh water, nutrition, health care, education, clothing and shelter. About 1.7 billion people are estimated to live...

 and war

War

War is a state of organized, armed, and often prolonged conflict carried on between states, nations, or other parties typified by extreme aggression, social disruption, and usually high mortality. War should be understood as an actual, intentional and widespread armed conflict between political...

time.