Counties of Norway Counties of Norway Norway is divided into 18 administrative regions, called counties (singular , plural (Bokmål) / "fylke" (Nynorsk) from Old Norse: "fylki" from the word "folk"); until 1918, they were known as "amter". The counties form the first-level subdivisions of Norway and are further divided into 422 municipalities ("kommune", pl. "kommuner" / "kommunar"). The island territories of Svalbard and Jan Mayen are outside the county division and ruled directly at the national level. The capital Oslo is considered both a county and a municipality. In 2017 the government decided to abolish the current counties and to replace them with
The World Is What It Is in 1996. The biography has been extensively reviewed: the reviewers include Paul Theroux, who wrote an earlier book about Naipaul. The biography was selected by the editors of the "New York Times Book Review" as one of the "Times"' "10 Best Books of 2008". It won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography, and the British literary award the Hawthornden Prize. The World Is What It Is The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul is a biography of the Nobel Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul by Patrick French. It was published in