My name is Mari Hauge and I’m an artist and songwriter from Stavanger.

In 2025, it will be 200 years since the sloop Restauration set sail and left the port of Stavanger with 52 souls on board. This marks the start of the great Norwegian emigration to America. Over the next 100 years, about 40% of Norway’s population went to America, for freedom, survival, and hope.

Why is this relevant today? Well, because the story of emigration is a chapter in the great saga of man’s indomitable will for freedom. It is a saga that must always live in our consciousness.

My maternal grandfather, author Alfred Hauge, wrote an award-winning trilogy of novels about the Norwegian emigration and the father of emigration, Cleng Peerson. This is a story about freedom, hope, identity, longing, finding your way, and love.

In 2025, I will release my next album with lyrics from this trilogy, giving a new perspective on the stories and lives of the Norwegian emigrants. The songs are based on the novel texts, but at the same time the lines are drawn up to our day and age and are thus fully relevant to a modern audience. Many of the longings, hopes, dreams and fears of the emigrants are just as relevant in our modern society; they just look different.

I’m contacting you because in connection with the album release I’m planning a tour in the USA, preferably in the Norwegian communities. I’m collaborating with the organization that has built a replica of Restauration and will sail it over to New York from Stavanger in 2025 to celebrate the emigration anniversary. I hope to reach as many of the Norwegian communities in the US as possible to tell the emigrants’ story through my music.