William Nygaard

William Nygaard (born 16 March 1943 in Oslo) is a Norwegian publisher and business economist. He is the grandson of the publisher William Martin Nygaard and the son of the publisher Mads Wiel Nygaard, both of whom died when he was nine, and he later directed the family firm H. Aschehoug & Co. Nygaard became a student in 1961 and a siviløkonom at the University of St. Gallen in 1967; his diploma thesis examined competition in the Norwegian book trade, and in 1988 he studied literature at Harvard University. After work in advertising and management consulting, he managed the educational subsidiary Pedagogisk Forlag from 1972 and became publishing director of Aschehoug in 1974, following the death of Arthur Holmesland.

He left that post at retirement age in 2010, after 36 years, and was succeeded by his son Mads Nygaard. In 1975 Aschehoug and Gyldendal Norsk Forlag jointly founded Kunnskapsforlaget, and under Nygaard the house renewed its fiction and documentary lists, commissioned multi-volume works on history and culture, and built paperback series aimed at different readerships, while also buying or taking stakes in other publishers and in bookselling. He joined the board of the Norwegian Publishers Association in 1978, chaired it from 1987 to 1990, and later served as vice-chair; he defended the trade's fixed-price agreement and Norwegian ownership, and helped draft standard contracts for fiction, children's books and nonfiction.

In 1989 Aschehoug issued the Norwegian edition of Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses. Earlier that year Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran's supreme leader, had pronounced a fatwa calling for the death of Rushdie and of those who spread the book, which the Iranian clergy held to be blasphemous. On 11 October 1993 Nygaard was hit by three large-calibre bullets in the yard of his home in Dagaliveien, Oslo, as he was about to get into his car, and he survived. The attack was quickly connected with the publication. The novel's Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, was killed in 1991, and the Italian translator Ettore Capriolo was attacked the same year and survived.

Oslo police closed the inquiry in 2007; it was reopened in 2009 after criticism of the original investigation. On 9 October 2018, days before a 25-year limitation period would have run out, the national crime unit Kripos charged two people living abroad with the attack, which stopped the clock on limitation. NRK later identified them as the Lebanese national Khaled Moussawi and an Iranian who had been a diplomat at Iran's embassy in Oslo in 1993. Oslo's public prosecutors dismissed the case on the state of the evidence on 9 April 2024. On 23 July 2024 the Director of Public Prosecutions reversed that dismissal and ordered more investigation, including attempts to interview the two charged people and a further interview of a central witness. Nygaard was awarded the 1994 Fritt Ord Prize for what the foundation called a "consistent, heroic protection of freedom of expression," was made a Knight 1st Class of the Order of St. Olav in 1998, chaired the board of the public broadcaster NRK from 2010 to 2014, and chaired Norwegian PEN from 2013 to 2019.

Early life and education

Family background

William Nygaard was born in Oslo on 16 March 1943, the son of the publisher Mads Wiel Nygaard (1898–1952) and Margrethe Louise Kildal (1911–2004). His grandfather, William Martin Nygaard (1865–1952), bought H. Aschehoug & Co. with Thorstein Lambrechts in 1888 and in 1900 took the publishing business alone under the name H. Aschehoug & Co. (W. Nygaard). By then the house was already the largest publisher in Norway; it became a family limited company in 1934, and William Martin Nygaard remained managing director until February 1940.

Mads Wiel Nygaard, a philologist, succeeded his father that year. In the autumn of 1943, during the German occupation in the Second World War, he was arrested and held for several months at Grini detention camp; his father again took charge of the firm. Both men died in 1952, when William was nine. Mads Wiel Nygaard died four weeks before William Martin Nygaard, who died in Oslo on 19 December.

He grew up in the world of books, but it was far from given that he would follow his father and grandfather into the firm. As a young man he was interested in sport, especially ski jumping, in which he recorded several good results, and in literature. In a later interview he said he had wanted to be a publisher for as long as he could remember, and that he had been “so goal-oriented that it was almost too much of a good thing.”

Education and first jobs

Nygaard passed the examen artium in 1961. He planned to study philology and began the examen philosophicum at the University of Oslo, at Blindern. He later said that the lectures in logic and linguistics, held in the assembly hall of Marienlyst School, particularly appealed to him. He then changed course. A philology degree, he judged, would leave him few options if he never became a publisher, while a business qualification would still be of use.

The alternative was the Handel, Industrie und Gewerbe programme in St. Gallen, Switzerland. The school was then the Hochschule St. Gallen für Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften; it took the name University of St. Gallen only in 1995. Besides economics and business administration, the course covered economic history, German classics, law, technology and languages. He graduated in 1967 as a siviløkonom. His diploma thesis examined competition in the Norwegian book trade, and during his studies he worked in bookshops and publishing houses in Norway, Germany and Austria.

In 1967 he joined Forenede Annonsebyråer as a consultant, later section chief, in its market and media department, the business later known as MMI (Markeds- og Mediainstituttet). From 1969 he was a consultant at Asbjørn Habberstad A/S, with assignments in Finland, Norway and Sweden in wood processing and in the book and education sectors. In 1972 he became manager (disponent) of Pedagogisk Forlag, a subsidiary Aschehoug had acquired in order to combine traditional and visual teaching materials. In 1988 he studied literature at Harvard University. The stay was taken as study leave from Aschehoug.

Career at Aschehoug

Appointment and restructuring

In 1974 William Nygaard, then 31, became managing director of the family-owned house H. Aschehoug & Co. (W. Nygaard), succeeding Arthur Holmesland, who had led the firm from 1955 until his death on 17 November 1973. The offices were at Sehesteds gate 3, on Oslo’s Sehesteds plass, opposite Gyldendal Norsk Forlag; the wrought-iron gate dates from 1911, and the square’s fountain carries Ørnulf Bast’s sculpture Evig liv (1950), given by Aschehoug at its 75th anniversary.

He had entered the group in 1972 as manager of Pedagogisk Forlag, a subsidiary taken over to connect conventional teaching materials with visual ones. The appointment came in a period of growth, but Norwegian publishing was already restructuring: smaller and larger houses met financial trouble, owners changed, and technical development raised production costs. Inside Aschehoug the business was divided into more independent operating units.

In a December 1999 decision the Norwegian Competition Authority called Aschehoug Norway’s largest publishing house and put the group’s 1998 operating income at 940 million kroner, including its share of the book clubs De norske Bokklubbene, against an estimated 913 million for Gyldendal once book clubs and associated companies were included. The same decision found schoolbook competition already substantially limited: before the two houses bought Universitetsforlaget in 1999, they together held about 49 percent of the primary-school market and about 36 percent of books for upper secondary school.

Lists, reference works and paperbacks

Nygaard emphasised a renewal of Aschehoug’s fiction and a larger documentary list, with a more visual, pedagogical presentation, while textbooks for different levels and kinds of school stayed central. From the 1970s the autumn list was launched at a garden party in the representation rooms at Drammensveien 99, formerly the home of his grandfather, the publisher William Nygaard.

He also kept up the firm’s multi-volume projects and started collected works in history and culture—Norwegian and world history, Norge i krig, and histories of Norwegian culture, art, music and ideas—as well as collected editions of literary authors and practical books on language and everyday subjects. In 1975 Aschehoug and Gyldendal folded their encyclopedia and dictionary departments into Kunnskapsforlaget, owned half and half; Aschehoug contributed Aschehougs leksikon and Gyldendal the “blue” dictionaries. The joint firm published Store norske leksikon from 1978, and by the last printed edition (2005–2007) more than 180,000 sets had been sold. Aschehoug held its half-share through Nygaard’s directorship and sold it to Gyldendal in September 2018.

A further investment went into inexpensive paperbacks, a line that had been dormant in Norway for several years. New series were aimed at different genres and readers, and the biographical account in Store norske leksikon states that the late-1980s results made Aschehoug the leading Norwegian publisher in that segment.

Ownership stakes and succession

In 1982 Aschehoug bought Forlaget Tanum-Norli, created in 1976 by merging Johan Grundt Tanum Forlag (1933) and Olaf Norlis Forlag (1890). Renamed Tano Aschehoug in 1985, it was a wholly owned subsidiary by 1999. The bookshop founded by Olaf Norli in 1890 was taken over in 1985 and, with the Bergen shop Melvær, was also wholly owned by 1999. In 2000 those Norli shops and the Lauritzen chain of Drammen became Norli Gruppen, owned equally by Aschehoug and the Lauritzen family; Nygaard’s biography calls it the country’s largest bookselling company, with about 70 outlets. After a pre-tax loss of 111 million kroner in 2008, Nygaard took the chair from Arild D. Lauritzen that autumn, Aschehoug supplied 60 million kroner of new capital, and in January 2009 it bought the Lauritzen half.

In 1992, after financial trouble at Forlaget Oktober, Aschehoug bought a majority and Nygaard became chair. The competition authority recorded 91 percent in 1999, the share still cited later; Oktober went on publishing mainly Norwegian and translated fiction, with some political and other nonfiction.

Universitetsforlaget was bought together with Gyldendal: after a 1988 purchase and a directed issue, each house held 25 percent, and Studentsamskipnaden i Trondheim remained the largest single owner. On 17 June 1999 they bid for the rest and by 25 June held rights to 94.5 percent; employees accepted for the balance in August. Universitetsforlaget had lost money in 1997 and 1998. The authority cleared the deal on 20 December 1999 only if the primary-school list and the subsidiary Økonomiforlaget were sold to an independent buyer and Gyldendal took Aschehoug’s half of Yrkesopplæringen; without those conditions it expected the pair’s combined schoolbook share to reach about 60 percent. Staff called the breakup “the partitioning of Universitetsforlaget.” About thirty English-language journals went to Taylor & Francis, and other lists were divided between Gyldendal and outside buyers. From 2000 Aschehoug ran a new, wholly owned Universitetsforlaget made from the university and journal publishing it kept and from Tano Aschehoug.

The 1999 decision also listed joint holdings with Gyldendal—half of Kunnskapsforlaget, half of the distributor Forlagssentralen and 48.5 percent of De norske Bokklubbene—plus 33 percent of Lydbokforlaget and full ownership of Kirkelig Kulturverksted, which Aschehoug held from 1987 to 2005. The authority treated that common ownership as making coordinated behaviour easier where the two houses were already large.

Nygaard retired on 31 March 2010 after 36 years. On 19 November 2009 the company named his son Mads Nygaard, then 40, group chief executive and publisher from 1 April 2010. Mads Nygaard told Aftenposten that he had long planned to consider applying once the post was advertised. NRK reported that he had been marketing director of Tiden and Oktober from 1996 to 2001, then chief executive of Dagsavisen and later a media consultant; Store norske leksikon dates his work at Oktober and Tiden from 1992. In October 2010, after the handover, Aschehoug agreed with NorgesGruppen to merge Norli Gruppen with NorgesGruppen’s book and stationery business, retaining 51 percent of the combined chain. Mads Nygaard stayed until the Amedia foundation bought the company in 2026, when William Nygaard was the largest of a little over 100 shareholders, with 45,000 shares, about 10 percent.

Book trade and literature policy

Publishers' association

Nygaard joined the board of Den norske Forleggerforening in 1978, chaired it from 1987 to 1990, and was later vice-chair in several periods. The Oslo-based association is the trade body for Norwegian publishers. It was founded on 19 March 1895, at the initiative of his grandfather William Martin Nygaard, as a publishers' group inside the booksellers' common association; the two organizations were separated in 1956.

As chair he was an important promoter of an annual Norwegian book fair, launched as Bok 88 in 1988. He was also a prominent advocate of Norwegian ownership in the book trade, together with his defence of the trade's regulated terms of sale.

Fixed prices and standard contracts

Since 1962, members of Forleggerforeningen and Den norske Bokhandlerforening have sold books under a terminable industry agreement, later called the bokavtale. Its central rule is a fixed book price: the publisher, not the retailer, sets the price to the customer for a limited time. The booksellers' association traces that rule to trading arrangements from 1957 and states its aim as giving readers throughout Norway a wide range of literature in Norwegian. Through the 1980s, while Nygaard was a board member and then chair, booksellers were exclusive dealers under regulated purchase terms, with stocking and repurchase duties, and the fixed price covered the publication year and the two following calendar years. It has also covered literature subscriptions and mutual duties to stock and supply books, under exemptions from competition law granted to support Norwegian language and literature.

Publishers and booksellers have generally backed the system as a way to keep both a broad list and a countrywide retail network. Nygaard made that case in October 2004, after Modernisation Minister Morten Meyer refused to extend the competition-law exemption. At the Frankfurt Book Fair he said price pressure would leave bestsellers less able to finance narrower books, and that diversity would shrink if competition increased. Den norske Forfatterforening is not a party to the retail agreement, but it has defended the fixed price because standard royalties are a share of it. In 2014 the association likened the price to a temporary minimum wage, warned that free pricing would leave authors' earnings to deals between publishers and shops, and said discount competition would concentrate sales on a few bestsellers.

The Norwegian Competition Authority has argued the opposite about resale prices. In 2020 competition director Lars Sørgard wrote that a common fixed price holds prices up longer than firms would choose alone, that a study of the 2005 shortening found many new books discounted sooner, and that cross-subsidy from bestsellers to narrow titles had not been shown. He cited Denmark's 2011 liberalization as not shown to have destroyed diversity, and preferred purchasing schemes and direct author support. From 1998 other outlets could sell many categories, discounts were negotiated individually, stocking duties became voluntary subscriptions, and the fixed price fell to the publication year plus one year. From 2005 it ended four months after the publication year, a 12.5 percent customer discount was allowed, and schoolbooks left the scheme. The Storting passed a book act in 2013 that the Solberg government did not bring into force. An act adopted on 16 June 2023, partly in force from 1 January 2024, instead requires a twelve-month fixed price for each format and still permits collective contracts on fees.

Separately, Nygaard led the publishers' work on a new standard contract for adult fiction in 1991 and on contracts for children's and young-adult authors in 1996, and he was central to the non-fiction agreement of 1999. The fiction agreement between Forleggerforeningen and Den norske Forfatterforening was signed in Oslo on 16 October 1991 and governed members' contracts from 1 January 1992. The default royalty was 15 percent of the softcover retail price on the first 5,000 copies and 20 percent thereafter, with a minimum advance, paid at publication, of one third of the calculated royalty on the first printing. Agreements of 18 March 1996 with Norske Barne- og Ungdomsbokforfattere, and 1999 fee and agency agreements with Norsk faglitterær forfatter- og oversetterforening, fixed pay in the same collective form. In decision V1999-84 the Competition Authority, though generally opposed to industry-wide fees, exempted those clauses until 15 December 2004. It found authors the weaker party without collective bargaining, treated standard rates as a saving on title-by-title talks, and noted that literary quality and purchasing schemes run by Arts Council Norway limited the competitive effect.

The Satanic Verses

Norwegian publication

Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses was published on 26 September 1988 by Viking, part of Penguin Books. Its title refers to an episode in Muslim tradition in which Muhammad, while receiving the revelations later set down in the Quran, was said for a time to have acknowledged deities other than God. Many Muslims took the novel's treatment of the prophet and his family as blasphemous and offensive. India banned the book within days; other countries followed; a copy was publicly burned in Bradford; and protests, including a mob attack on the United States cultural centre in Islamabad in which six people were killed, turned violent.

On 14 February 1989 Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran's supreme leader, broadcast what was widely called a fatwa. In the text reported by the BBC he told Muslims that the author of a book "against Islam, the Prophet and the Koran, and all those involved in its publication who are aware of its content, are sentenced to death." He asked that they be killed quickly and said that anyone who died in the attempt would be a martyr. An Iranian religious foundation offered a cash reward, later described as $1 million, or $3 million if an Iranian carried out the killing. Some Islamic jurists disputed that a fatwa is a judgment others may enforce. Rushdie said the book was not a blasphemy against Islam and that he doubted Khomeini had read more than extracts. He went into hiding under British police protection. Viking circulated warnings to its staff, and security was increased at offices, bookshops and warehouses.

Aschehoug, the Oslo house then headed by William Nygaard, proceeded with a Norwegian edition, Sataniske vers, translated by Kari Risvik. She had already translated earlier Rushdie novels for the firm, and in 1996 received Fritt Ord's honour for making his work known in Norwegian. Interviewed in Dagbladet about the death sentence, Nygaard said the threats did not change the decision to publish and that he was too fatalistic to be frightened by them. He later said Nordic colleagues, including in Denmark, had turned the book down. Aschehoug moved the release forward and, without prior announcement, sent copies to Oslo-area bookshops on 11 April 1989; another NRK account dates publication to 12 April.

Muslim organizations in Norway tried to stop the book through the courts. On Saturday 26 February 1989 about 3,000 Muslims marched through Oslo chanting "Stop the book in Norway"; Aftenposten later described a February demonstration of nearly 4,000, led by imams including Allama Mushtaq Ahmad Chishti. NRK reported that a few counter-demonstrators carrying a placard about freedom of expression were knocked down by the crowd. Leaders of the Islamic Defence Council in Norway sued Nygaard, Aschehoug and the book club Bokklubben Nye Bøker for breach of the blasphemy provision, and did not succeed. The Norwegian debate turned largely on freedom of expression and its limits, with the constitution's blasphemy clause in the background.

Threats before 1993

Police guarded the publishing house and the homes of Nygaard and the translators, and NRK later reported that armed security-police officers were inside his house at the time of the unannounced release. He received death threats and for a time had a police bodyguard. The edict did not stop him appearing with Rushdie. At Aschehoug's garden party in 1992, held at the firm's villa on Drammensveien, near the Iranian embassy, Rushdie arrived as a guest; photographs of him with Nygaard, and with education minister Gudmund Hernes, were widely published, and it later emerged that Rushdie had met culture minister Åse Kleveland the evening before. NRK described the occasion as the first time since 1989 that members of a government had been willing to meet the author.

Two nights after the April 1989 deliveries, unknown attackers broke the windows of Rykkinn bokhandel in Bærum and of Viul Bok og Papir at Holtet in Oslo and threw bottles of burning liquid inside. Both shops were gutted, and neither arson was solved. Shops in Britain and the United States that went on selling the novel were firebombed as well.

In the summer of 1991 the violence reached translators. On 3 July Ettore Capriolo, the Italian translator, was stabbed in his apartment in Milan by a man who identified himself as Iranian and who had come on the pretext of seeking a translation; Capriolo was badly wounded and survived. On 12 July the Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, a scholar of Islamic culture, was stabbed to death at the University of Tsukuba, north-east of Tokyo, where he worked. Neither case was solved. Khomeini had died in June 1989, but his successor, Ali Khamenei, maintained the ruling, and people connected with the book remained under threat.

Assassination attempt

The shooting on 11 October 1993

On the morning of 11 October 1993, William Nygaard, then 50 and managing director of the publishing house Aschehoug, was shot outside his home in Dagaliveien, on Holmenkollåsen in Oslo. He later told NRK that he left the house at about 8:30, intending to exercise before work, and found the left front tyre of his car flat. The tyre had been cut with a knife. Nygaard has said he believed the cut was meant to make him crouch between the car and the wall of the house; instead he walked around the car, planning to switch off the alarm and call a taxi rather than change the wheel. While he stood there, three shots were fired from shrubbery across the parking area.

He was hit from behind by three Federal Hydra-Shok rounds, expanding bullets that police recovered and examined. One passed through his abdomen and was found in the gravel the next day; the other two were removed in surgery. Photographs of his jacket showed three entry holes in the back. From the projectiles, investigators concluded that the weapon was a.44-calibre Dan Wesson revolver with an interchangeable barrel. Nygaard has said he heard no report and thought a telephone wired to the car battery had given him an electric shock. He ran about ten metres, felt a third impact at the edge of the slope, and rolled down onto the lawn, unable to move. Helga Waagaard, a visitor at a neighbour’s house, heard him call, found him in the grass, telephoned the emergency number and wrapped him in a woollen blanket. He was wearing a thick oilskin coat. Little blood was visible, and ambulance staff did not at first notice the swelling of his abdomen.

The Independent reported that day that he was in a serious but stable condition after being shot in the back and stomach, and that the bullets had missed his spine. The shooting was the third attack on people connected with Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses: the Italian translator Ettore Capriolo had been stabbed and wounded at his home in Milan on 3 July 1991, and the Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi was stabbed to death in Tokyo eight days later. Aschehoug had issued a Norwegian edition in 1989, after Iran’s Ruhollah Khomeini pronounced a fatwa calling for the death of Rushdie and of those who helped to spread the book, which Iranian clerics regarded as blasphemous.

That afternoon Truls Fyhn, head of the Oslo criminal-investigation division, told reporters that police were keeping every possibility open but were not ruling out a connection with that publication. Police tightened checks at airports, borders, railway stations and ports and alerted Interpol, on the suspicion that the attack had been carried out by agents from Iran; they said they then had no eyewitness description. Speaking to The Independent that night, Rushdie called Nygaard “one of my oldest and dearest friends” and said that, whether or not Iran was directly responsible, “the fatwa is the assailant.” He urged Western governments to break relations, freeze credit, impose sanctions, and consider taking Iran before the World Court. A Norwegian diplomat who was a friend of Nygaard said that “all speculation is in the direction of a link with Iran.”

Hospital and return to work

Nygaard was operated on at Ullevål Hospital. He has said he did not realise he had been shot until he woke from the anaesthetic, by which time bullets had been removed. According to NRK’s later reconstruction, the doctor on duty knew who the patient was, had read the novel, and at once connected the wounds with the book.

Rehabilitation then lasted four months at Sunnaas Hospital. About two months after the shooting he gave a press conference from Sunnaas. He said he had no regrets about publishing the book—“No, not in any way”—and that standing for freedom of expression was a central task of the publishing house. He reminded reporters that a death threat connected with the novel had come from only one quarter, citing the killing of the Japanese translator and the wounding of the Italian translator, and he invited them to draw their own conclusion about whether the Iranian embassy in Norway had known what was going to happen.

He remained managing director of the family firm until he retired in 2010. After the long convalescence he could not go about without security guards, and he has described the arrangement that followed once he was back on his feet as a loss of freedom on top of the pain of the injuries. He has called being shot in his own garden on a morning “a lonely thing,” and has described the attack as aimed at “the free voice, the artistically free voice,” and as an assault across borders that he termed an active political act of terrorism.

Criminal investigation

Oslo police and the 2007 closure

Oslo police investigated the shooting of publisher William Nygaard outside his home in Dagaliveien, Oslo, on 11 October 1993. The attack was discussed in connection with Aschehoug’s Norwegian edition of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa, but that link was not treated as settled. Lead investigator Leif A. Lier later said he had not known the book or the threats. Nygaard said officers interviewed his friends at length rather than pursuing the fatwa; Aftenposten reported that police took about five years to conclude the tracks pointed that way.

Early lines included a Norwegian-Pakistani man the press called “Ali,” questioned in Pakistan in 1994, arrested on his return and later released; he is not among those later charged. In November 1993 police searched the Oslo home of Lebanese national Khaled Moussawi and did not charge him. By April 1995 police lawyer Sveinung Sponheim said the inquiry was not close to a solution, and Kripos reviewed the file. It recommended more work on the Iranian embassy milieu, on men linked to Hezbollah, and a new interview with “Ali”; NRK later reported that Oslo police did little with that advice. Officers later described failures, including a border alert that lay unread for a day and the 1998 release of “Ali” just before a prepared interview. Lier defended a broad first phase as ordinary practice, because a case needs proof rather than belief.

On 19 April 2007 Oslo police closed the case as the work of an unknown perpetrator, after nearly 14 years, without telling Nygaard. Odd Isungset’s 2008 TV 2 documentary and his 2010 book Hvem skjøt William Nygaard? listed operational and legal errors, weak border control and failed arrests, and argued that the Police Surveillance Service (POT, later the Norwegian Police Security Service) had not been properly used. Nygaard, criticising the inquiry in public alongside the book, said a weak team had underestimated the fatwa. State prosecutor Lasse Qvigstad said in 2012 that obvious interviews were never done, too many threads were loose, and earlier Kripos advice was largely ignored. He agreed too little energy had been spent for a time, but said he saw no sign that political bodies had directed the file, a claim Rushdie had made about Norway’s relations with Iran.

Kripos, charges and the limitation period

In 2008 Nygaard and Isungset met Director of Public Prosecutions Tor-Aksel Busch, fearing the case would become time-barred. That December Busch wrote that the shooting went beyond an ordinary serious crime and also appeared as an attack on fundamental societal values. After Qvigstad’s review it was reopened in 2009 and moved from Oslo police to a Kripos team under Asbjørn Hansen, which worked in secret. Nygaard said he had not been told. NRK later reported that POT had written, a week before the shooting, about suspicious activity by an Iranian diplomat, and that Oslo police leaders said they had not been shown the Iran and Hezbollah leads.

Prosecutors treated the statute of limitations on the gravest counts as 25 years, expiring on 11 October 2018. On 9 October 2018 Kripos charged suspects who were abroad. Inspector Anne Cecilie Dessarud said there were reasonable grounds for suspicion and that the case mattered to society. The step, siktelse, names a formal suspect; it is not an indictment or a finding of guilt. The counts were complicity in attempted premeditated murder under section 233 of the 1902 Penal Code and an attack on significant societal interests under section 99a. Kripos said it had no reason to think the motive was anything other than Nygaard’s role as publisher of the book. His lawyer then, Vidar Strømme, said the charges stopped the case expiring, and NRK reported that they interrupted the limitation period.

Lawyers later disagreed on whether 25 years had applied at all. One view, associated with former Supreme Court justice Magnus Matningsdal, was that attempted murder under the 1902 code carried 15 years and was time-barred in 2008; Helle answered that an attempt could draw 20 years and 11 months, so the 2018 charges were in time, while a district-court judge called the point unsettled.

In November 2021 NRK named one of the two as Khaled Moussawi, a Lebanon national who lived in Oslo from 1989 until his expulsion in 1996 and who had relatives in Hezbollah. In Beirut he denied any role, offered to come to Norway to be questioned, and said he learned of the charge only from NRK. NRK described the other man only as a former first secretary at Iran’s embassy in Oslo; other reporting has named him Mohammad Nik-Khah, also spelled Nikkhah. He arrived in April 1989 and left on 7 October 1993, and the embassy that day told the foreign ministry he had gone. NRK, citing sources, reported a background in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Police assessed that one of the two had fired and the other had a central planning role, but reported no DNA or other physical evidence; the case rested mainly on witness accounts from a criminal milieu. Iran’s embassy told NRK the allegation was without foundation. The diplomat had not been told he was charged, and neither man has been convicted.

Dismissal and the 2024 order to continue

After about 14 years Kripos sent the file to the Oslo public prosecutor in 2023. PEN International said the September 2023 submission recommended dismissal for insufficient evidence. On 9 April 2024 senior public prosecutor Lars Erik Alfheim dropped the case på bevisets stilling, on the state of the evidence, citing the strict criminal standard of proof. In the written reasons NRK reported, he said nothing of weight suggested a motive other than publication of The Satanic Verses, and that the attempt was directly connected to Iran’s death sentence against Rushdie and his translators and publishers.

Nygaard called the decision a great disappointment and appealed with Helle to the Director of Public Prosecutions. Helle said two men had been charged for more than five years and that the diplomat had never been asked to account. On 23 July 2024 the Director of Public Prosecutions reversed the dismissal and ordered an attempt to question both men, whom Helle said were in Lebanon and Iran, plus a new interview with a central witness. The office confirmed the order to NRK. Nygaard called it “a victory for freedom of expression and a sharp signal that there shall not be impunity for international state terrorism.” Alfheim said a legal-assistance request to police in one suspect’s home state had brought the reply that the man had nothing to do with the case. As of 31 December 2025, PEN International reported that the investigation was still under way, and no conviction has been reported.

Free-speech advocacy and honours

Awards

After he was shot in October 1993, William Nygaard kept a public defence of Salman Rushdie and of freedom of expression. In 1994 the Fritt Ord Foundation awarded him the Fritt Ord Prize, citing “For konsekvent og modig vern av ytringsfriheten” (“For consistent and courageous defence of freedom of expression”). Its account of the ceremony notes that he used the occasion to criticise the Norwegian government for passivity (unnfallenhet) in the Rushdie case.

The next year Aschehoug issued his book Det frie ords pris (The Price of Free Speech), with an introduction by Rushdie. Store norske leksikon also records two 1995 paintings of him by Håkon Bleken, held by the publishing house.

Further honours clustered in 1998. On Friday 16 October, at an Oslo symposium marking ten years since the death sentence against Rushdie, Swedish minister Marita Ulvskog presented him with the Torgny Segerstedt prize, named for the editor Torgny Segerstedt. Stavanger Aftenblad, writing of the distinction Voksenåsen awards every other year, called it the Segerstedt medal and listed Nygaard for 1998, after Segerstedt’s daughter Ingrid in 1996. The same year he was appointed Knight 1st Class of the Order of St. Olav. The University of Tromsø, now UiT The Arctic University of Norway, also made Nygaard and Rushdie honorary doctors at the 30th anniversary of the Storting’s decision to found the university. VG reported on 23 March that both would attend the Saturday ceremony. UiT says Nygaard was honoured as an uncompromising spokesman for freedom of expression who had suffered for that stance; rector Tove Bull argued that a university cannot exist without freedom of thought and speech. In his address Rushdie said the fight for free speech begins when someone says something one dislikes, and that what has been thought cannot be made unthought.

In 2019 Gunnar Sønsteby’s Memorial Fund gave him the Gunnar Sønsteby Prize, for a person or organisation that has in practice defended basic values of Norwegian democracy. The fund said no other postwar Norwegian had paid so high a personal price for the courage to speak, and that for 25 years he had taken up cases of prosecuted writers, publishers and journalists. The nomination text quoted by Forsvarets forum called the prize less a commemoration of the attack than “a tribute to a never-resting champion of freedom of expression,” citing his publishing and his work in PEN International. It was presented on 11 January 2019 in the Fanehallen at Akershus Fortress. Nygaard called it recognition of a collective stance at Aschehoug and in PEN, and gave the money to a new Norsk PEN freedom-of-expression fund, to be launched on 31 January. He said the Rushdie affair had shown that Islamism could turn violent, that Aschehoug had brought forward rather than delayed the Norwegian edition of The Satanic Verses, and that he somewhat regretted the heavy police presence at the launch: freedom of expression was “best served by being fought for without weapons in hand.”

Norwegian PEN and public commentary

Norsk PEN, the Norwegian centre of PEN International, elected Nygaard chair on 23 April 2013. He said it should draw more, and younger, people into Norwegian and international free-expression work and into universal human rights. Re-elected in 2015 for two years, he described a domestic project, “Norsk ytringsfrihet og ytringsansvar,” on whistleblowers, surveillance, media policy and multicultural questions, beside work on writers in countries including Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Belarus, Turkey, Iran and Russia. Store norske leksikon dates the chairmanship to 2013–2019. On 24 April 2019, after six years, the annual meeting elected Kjersti Løken Stavrum to succeed him. PEN International’s 87th Congress, held from 20 to 24 September 2021, elected him a vice president, and a September 2025 announcement of further vice presidents still listed him in that group.

He continued to frame Rushdie, and the unresolved attack, as matters of free expression rather than a private grievance. On 12 August 2022, after the stabbing of Salman Rushdie on stage at the Chautauqua Institution in New York state, he told NTB he was shocked, hoped the injuries were not serious, and that Rushdie had “paid a high price.” He told NRK he was astonished and that “this concerns him, not me.” A Norsk PEN statement the next day quoted him calling an attack on the author an attack on free literature, when artistic openness was a means of dialogue between countries and religions. On 23 July 2024, after the Director of Public Prosecutions reversed a decision to drop the prosecution over the 1993 shooting and ordered further investigation, Nygaard told NTB: “This is a victory for freedom of expression and a sharp signal that there shall be no impunity for international state terrorism.”

Later public offices

NRK

On 10 June 2010 the general meeting of NRK (Norsk rikskringkasting AS), which is the minister of culture, elected William Nygaard chair of the board. He was 67 and had left the chief executive post at Aschehoug earlier that year after 36 years. He succeeded Hallvard Bakke as chair. Culture minister Anniken Huitfeldt said NRK had gained a chair with a background in both cultural life and business. Of the board's nine members, the general meeting chooses the chair, the deputy and four others, and the staff elect three. The board sets financial and strategic limits and appoints the director-general, but does not intervene in programming. Headquarters are at Marienlyst in Oslo.

The main appointment of the chairmanship came on 11 December 2012, when the board named Thor Gjermund Eriksen to succeed Hans-Tore Bjerkaas as director-general. Nygaard called Eriksen, then chief executive of Amedia and editor-in-chief of Dagbladet from 2003 to 2006, the candidate who best met the requirements and one of the country's most experienced media leaders. Eriksen, until then a Labour Party member, left the party the day before the announcement. Press comment had suggested that the culture minister might in effect pick the next director-general. Nygaard said he had told Knut Olav Åmås, then culture editor of Aftenposten, and Dagbladet's editor that politicians no longer appointed broadcasting chiefs and that the hire would follow the board's powers and NRK's statutes.

Board periods last two years, and Nygaard also chaired the 2012–2014 board. He had told the Ministry of Culture he would take a third period, then changed his mind. On 26 May 2014 he withdrew in a letter to the ministry, and he left at the general meeting on 10 June 2014 after four years. He wrote that a new government "deserves fresh blood in the post" and that a new board should be free to renew strategy with the administration, and he said he wanted more time and a freer hand as chair of Norske PEN. He denied any dispute with culture minister Thorhild Widvey, who had opened a review of NRK's remit, financing and commercial limits. The Conservative–Progress government's 2014 licence settlement raised NRK's income by 85.5 million kroner, 28 million below the previous minister Hadia Tajik's proposal; Eriksen called the result disappointing. Nygaard said the form of finance mattered less than keeping a strong, independent public broadcaster, and that he did not expect the cross-party settlement to be undone. Widvey then appointed former Schibsted executive Birger Magnus as chair and replaced nearly all the external members; only Audhild Gregoriusdotter Rotevatn stayed.

Cultural institutions

Most of Nygaard's other seats ran during the Aschehoug years, not only after 2010. Store norske leksikon lists board posts at Den Norske Bokklubben, Forlagsentralen, Kunnskapsforlaget, Forlaget TANO, Dagbladet, Norlis Bokhandel, Universitetsforlaget, Nationaltheatret and Nasjonalmuseet, and states that he became chair of Forlaget Oktober in 1992. A 4 July 2007 notice in the Register of Business Enterprises names him a board member of De norske Bokklubbene AS for the A shareholders. A Nasjonalmuseet page archived in May 2006 places him on the board under chair Christian Bjelland. Writing in Aftenposten in 2008, he identified himself as a National Theatre board member from 1997 to 2005 and said the main stage's duty to new Norwegian drama had often been discussed in his time with little result.

In autumn 1994, still Aschehoug's director, he led the founding of the foundation "Sigrid Undset-dagene, Lillehammer Litteraturfestival", whose founders included the Nansen School, Aschehoug and Lillehammer municipality. From the first festival in 1995 the council was the highest body and Nygaard its leader; the event later took the name Norwegian Literature Festival (Norsk litteraturfestival — Sigrid Undset-dagene). After knutepunkt status brought fixed public grants, the board replaced the council as the supreme authority in 2006, and Nygaard left the council chair after eleven years while remaining a member for a time. He is also a member of the Norwegian Academy for Language and Literature (Det Norske Akademi for Språk og Litteratur), listed there under publishing.