Aimee Sommerfelt was bom on April 2, 1892, in Oslo, Norway. As a child, she read a great deal, acted out Norwegian fairy tales, and invented romantic and suspenseful stories with her siblings and friends. To this creativity, Sommerfelt added the compassion and sensitivity toward others that she learned from her father, Henrik Arnold Thaulow, a respected psychiatrist.

She married Alf Sommerfelt, a professor of comparative linguistics at Oslo University, and had two daughters and a son. They settled in a rural area not far from her childhood home, and Sommerfelt started writing for young adults in Norwegian as early as 1933. Her philosophy, based on her happy childhood, was that books for young adults should be entertaining, not disturbing, but the Second World War and the German occupation of Norway turned her attention to serious topics. She responded to her changed environment by writing several historical...