Ole Åsli and Tony Bakkejord have been writing Viking fiction together since 2016. One has a doctorate in psychology, the other is a psychiatrist, and both write from above the Arctic Circle, on the same northern Norwegian coast their Vikings once sailed. What started as a Norwegian trilogy is now three linked series — Viking Ventures, Vikings of Norway and The Shieldmaiden — one saga told across three generations. They write the odd dark fantasy too, but the Viking world keeps pulling them back.
Ole Åsli
Ole Åsli is a researcher and lecturer at the Arctic University of Norway, where he studies how people think and why they do what they do. That turns out to be useful when an evening is spent deciding how a cornered Viking will react with a blade at his throat. In what spare time the day job leaves him, he reads widely and writes the kind of fiction he would want to read himself, stories that care less about the battle than about who walks away from it. Whatever the setting, they keep circling the same question: what a person becomes when everything is taken from them. He lives and writes in Tromsø, at the top of the map.
Tony Bakkejord
Tony Bakkejord is a Norwegian psychiatrist and forensic psychiatrist who has spent more than fifteen years working at the harder edges of the mind, from psychosis and trauma to ADHD. He trained as a doctor and practises as a metacognitive therapist. Alongside medicine he holds a university degree in history, with a soft spot for the Roman Empire, the Viking Age and the Second World War. He does most of his writing at his cabin, where the phone signal is poor and the ideas come easily. The fiction draws on both halves of that life: a clinician's instinct for character, and a historian's refusal to let the past stay tidy.
