Career
Eggen is from a family with several other contemporary Norwegian writers. As a novelist, Eggen made his debut with an about the life and death of general Carl Gustav Fleischer, the Norwegian commander in chief at Narvik 1940. He also wrote a portrait of the writer Agnar Mykle, his father-in-law and has written novels with topics from medieval Norway.
In 1993 Eggen published The boy from Gimle—the story of a German child, who grows up in a Nazi milieu.
As a consequence, two years later the Norwegian war children got an official excuse. Eggen became a State Scholar in 2003.
"He is a symbol of an entire generation", the spokesman for the Norwegian Labour Party said in parliament.