In 1996 he was awarded the Halldis Moren Vesaas poetry-prize. In its grounds the jury said that Christiansen's body of work holds a unique position because it exposes a new phase in modernity in Norway with its ‘tough but sensual masculine urbanity, not alienated from, but integrated with the elements, the shiftings in nature, transience and permanence’.
In 1998 Christiansen was awarded the Språklig samling Prize for Literature and in 2003 the prestigeous Dobloug Prize.
In his postscript to Selected Poems, the Danish poet Per Højholt stresses the brevity, the paradoxal and elusive qualities in Christiansen’s poetry, which foregrounds exploration: ‘The world persists in its weird and chaotic ways, but Rune Christiansen’s poems indicate paths through it, that are perfectly unique, and fruitful’.
Christiansen is a poet distinguished by an impressionable, warm, and offbeat language. To puncture the cliches of everyday language demands a high degree of precision. Christiansen apparently writes quiet poems, but manages to ignite a fresh experience, where sudden flashes of clarity and staggering insights open themselves to the reader. The mind’s constituents are treated as a reality equal to the concrete objects and landscapes that his poems focus and expose so distinctly.
Christiansen has stated that ‘poetry borrows its authority from wanting’. He characterizes his poems as ‘transient rooms where oblivion and recognition illuminate and amplify each other as equal and simultaneous events’.
His novels include: Steve McQueen is Dead (1997), Intimacy (2000), At Your Most Beautiful (2000), The Absence of Music (2007), Krysantemum (2009).
He has received the following prizes: The Oktober Prize 1994, Halldis Moren Vesaas Prize 1996, Språklig Samling Prize for Literature 1998, The Dobloug Prize 2003, The Oslo Prize 2007.
