Peer Gynt Prize Peer Gynt Prize The Peer Gynt Prize or the Peer Gynt Award ("Årets Peer Gynt" or "Per Gynt-prisen") is a private Norwegian prize presented annually by the private commercial company "Peer Gynt AS" during the Peer Gynt Festival, also organised by the same company. The Peer Gynt Prize is named after the main character in "Peer Gynt" (1867), a five-act play in verse by Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen. The prize is awarded to people or institutions who has marked themselves in a positive way nationally and internationally. However, the prize has received criticism for misrepresenting the Peer Gynt character, who
Peer Gynt lovers – the deeply committed Solveig and the superficial Peer, who is more a surface for projections than a coherent character. The simplest conclusion one may draw from "Peer Gynt", is expressed in the eloquent prose of the author: “"If you lie; are you real?"” The literary critic Harold Bloom of New York University in his book "The Western Canon" has challenged the conventional reading of "Peer Gynt", stating:Far more than Goethe's Faust, Peer is the one nineteenth-century literary character who has the largeness of the grandest characters of Renaissance imaginings. Dickens, Tolstoy, Stendhal, Hugo, even Balzac have no single