About

I am a Norwegian writer and preacher. For years I led a folk high school — a Norwegian institution where young people spend a year learning the things no one examines them in: how to live, what to believe, who to become. That year changes people.

What struck me there was how ordinary the turning points look. Someone is handed more than they can carry, and the person who walks out at the end of the year is not the one who arrived. Nobody announces it. It happens in a corridor, in a bad week, in a conversation that goes wrong.

I have carried the story of Joseph for about thirty years. It has done to me what I watched that year do to them — and that is most of why I write at all.

Genesis tells it in a few chapters and leaves most of it out. I wanted the parts it leaves out. How did Potiphar rise to power? Who was his wife? Genesis never names her. I call her Zuleika. And what happened in the years between — among the tents, among the brothers, in Hebron, where Jacob waited without knowing?

Joseph is seventeen when his brothers strip the coat off his back and sell him to a passing caravan. He arrives in an Egypt that runs on grain and fear, learns its language and its law, rises inside another man’s house — and then spends the better part of a lifetime deciding what to do about the people who put him there. I wrote it as what it is: a political thriller inside a family.

People sometimes expect a preacher’s novel to come with a lesson attached. This one doesn’t. The story is older and harder than anything I could add to it.

The Joseph Trilogy is three books. The first is out on November 17, 2026. The second and third are being written.

I live on the south coast of Norway. My Norwegian books are at potensiale.no.

— Terje Hystad
terje@potensiale.no