Steinar Opstad was born in 1971 in Norway, and lives in Oslo. He studied German, History of Religion and World Literature at the University of Oslo and the University of Bergen. His first volume of poems, Tablets and Commandments, came in 1996 and was followed by The Common (1998), Illiterate (2000), Alphabet and Memory (2002) and Gather in the Axes for the Night (2005). He is the editor of the anthologies Soft glass (2000) and But Truth came in the form of a Poem (2003). He is also a keen debater, in the daily press, in periodicals and in books. Steinar Opstad has won several prestigeous literary prizes, from his debut in 1996 until present.